IT pros skilled in the many areas of networking are in high demand in today’s job market. Those serious about their IT careers should consider one or more of these best-of-breed networking certifications to set themselves apart from their competitors.

When it comes to the care and feeding of modern networks, there’s quite a lengthy list of tools and technologies that qualified IT professionals must master – especially those who aspire to work as network administrators. In addition to the servers and clients that make up the endpoints in such environments, there’s a lot of network infrastructure to worry about. This includes switches and routers (both physical and virtual), plus a raft of appliances and services, such as unified threat management (UTM), next-generation firewalls (NGFs), software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions, virtualization (NFV) components and WAN optimization, as well as spam, email, and content filtering.

Wrapping your head around all these certification options and specialties can be challenging, but knowing where to start can help. We looked at five networking certifications (in their order of appearance in the job boards table that follows) that we consider leaders in the field of networking for 2019 and beyond.

To pick our leaders, we looked at the state of networking certification, examined various market and salary surveys, and performed an informal job board survey that revealed the number of job posts across the U.S. in which our featured certifications were mentioned on a given day.

Making its first appearance on the leader board this year is the SolarWinds Certified Professional (SCP). It replaces the Juniper Enterprise Routing and Switching, Expert (JNCIE-ENT) credential. While the JNCIE remains a great credential, job board numbers for the SCP were stronger, earning it a slot in the top five. The other featured credentials include the Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert (CCIE), Cisco Certified Network Professional (CCNP), CompTIA Network+ and WCNA Certification for Wireshark (WCNA).

• Becoming certified as a wireless professional is an effective way to land a high-paying job.
• As the wireless industry grows, it’s crucial to select the certifications that will enhance your career as a wireless professional.
• CCNA, CCNP Enterprise, CompTIA Network+, CWNA and CWSP are among the most valuable certifications, but many more are available.
• This article is for IT professionals seeking to advance their careers in the wireless networking arena.

The wireless networking space has exploded in latest years and wireless technologies have become a connectivity game-changer. The advent of fourth-generation (4G) wireless wide-area networking technologies and the emergence of LTE (Long Term Evolution) and 5G technology further underscore wireless networking’s critical role in business today. 

The demand for professionals with wireless networking knowledge and expertise is at an all-time high. As wireless professionals map their career paths, adding respected wireless networking certifications to their resumes can show hiring managers they have the cutting-edge, in-demand career skills to take their organizations to the next level. 

We’ll highlight the best wireless networking certifications IT professionals can obtain to demonstrate their skills to current and prospective employers. 

More organisations are adopting hybrid work across the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region but the experience for many workers is less than ideal, according to a senior Cisco executive.

Speaking to Computer Weekly on a latest visit to Singapore, Jeetu Patel, executive vice-president and general manager of security and collaboration at Cisco, said with most meetings having at least one remote participant, spaces will need to be configured not only for people in a physical meeting room, but also for those who are not in the room.

“Today, if you have four people in a conference room and three people who are not in the room, the experience for the three people is not that great because what happens is someone invariably gets up and starts drawing on a whiteboard.

“They wouldn’t know what’s going on and won’t be able to read the facial expressions and non-verbal cues of those in the room. That’s such an important part of communication,” he said.

Patel said Cisco has been working on solving that problem for the past 18 months to make sure hybrid work arrangements will provide everyone in a meeting, whether they are participating virtually or in person, a seat at the table.

This can be done through its artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities that work behind the scenes to remove background noise and zoom in on everyone in the room, in addition to digital whiteboards that meeting participants can use to jot down or edit content during a meeting.

“We want to make sure our AI capabilities can take the experience to the next level. We started with predictive AI, and now, with generative AI, it gets even better. If you missed a meeting, we could tell you what you missed based on the permissions you had on the meetings you could have attended but chose not to,” Patel said.

While organisations in APAC have been progressive in adopting hybrid work arrangements, Patel cautioned them against making the mistake of mandating that employees work in the office all the time.

“It’s much better to create a magnet than a mandate,” he said. “Give people a reason to come back to the office because when they collaborate in the office, there’s going to be this X factor that they don’t get when they are 100% remote.”

Patel said adopting hybrid work would also help organisations recruit the best talent from anywhere in the world, enabling more people to participate equally in a global economy.

“The opportunity is very unevenly distributed right now, but human potential is pretty evenly distributed, so it would be nice if anyone in a village in Bangladesh can have the same economic opportunity as someone in Silicon Valley.

“Most of the time, the mindset is that you are distance-bound, so if you don’t happen to be in the same geography, then you don’t have access to opportunity. That’s a very archaic way of thinking and we need to think about this in a much more progressive manner,” he said.

But societal changes are needed to maximise the potential of a hybrid workforce. For one thing, business leaders will have to learn how to build relationships with people without meeting them in person.

“A 30-minute video conference is usually very structured. There’s an agenda and an end. If no one’s talking after 23 minutes, someone will invariably say we can provide you back seven minutes. That always happens.

“But when you have dinner with someone – if there’s a lull, you don’t just say you’re going to leave. You’ll ask about that person’s family or whatever it might be. Those questions provide you context and texture about the person, which creates familiarity and the ability to engage in debate without taking things personally. And conflict is such a necessary condition of business that if you don’t have that familiarity, it doesn’t work.”

Enabling hybrid work also brings with it a set of security considerations. Patel said while there is an implicit level of trust between people about who they are when they are engaged in a face-to-face conversation, that trust needs to be present in a hybrid work environment as well.

“How do you prevent deep fakes from coming into a meeting? How do you make sure your private data does not get stolen? How do you create security conditions so that people can use the systems without worrying about being hacked?

“Those are the baseline security capabilities that you need in any hybrid work solution. I would take it a step further and say that in the future, the absence of security will completely deter anyone from using a system,” he said.

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Is the inevitable backlash against generative artificial intelligence at hand? Some early signals suggest the possibility, but you’d never know it from all the fundings and new products streaming out this week, as SiliconANGLE documented in a raft of stories this week.

We also covered the better-than-expected quarterly earnings from Cisco Systems Inc., which gave investors hope that a tech spending lull might be easing. Meantime, though, some cybersecurity companies are struggling as generative AI could be siphoning off information technology investments. Crypto isn’t dead yet despite the ongoing wintry conditions. And Intel Corp. dropped its bid for Tower Semiconductor after China’s regulators essentially nixed it — another in a string of bad news for the struggling chipmaking giant — even as Arm Ltd.’s IPO moves ahead.

For an insightful and entertaining take on this and other news in enterprise and emerging tech, check out this week’s theCUBE Pod, John Furrier’s and Dave Vellante’s weekly podcast. And this weekend, look for Vellante’s Breaking Analysis, his weekly deep dive on an enterprise tech trend.

I’ll kick things off this week with a look at the current state of the cybersecurity industry through the lens of one of its top leaders, Palo Alto Networks Inc., which announced earnings today.

As cybersecurity hits a slower patch, Palo Alto Networks charts plan to stay ahead

Palo Alto held a highly unusual presentation on its earnings and a review of its strategy today — unusual in that Friday announcements are usually reserved for bad news. Not so today, since in Palo Alto’s case, the news was plenty good. (As Chief Executive Nikesh Arora apologetically explained on the call, which was kicked off with a remix of Rebecca Black’s 2011 earworm “Friday,” he wanted to leave time to talk one-on-one with analysts over the weekend before a planned company sales meeting that starts Sunday, on top of a board meeting this week.)

Anyway, the company reported its fiscal fourth-quarter profit before certain costs such as stock compensation jumped 90% from a year ago, to $482.5 million, or $1.44 a share. Net profit hit $227.7 million, or 64 cents a share. Revenue rose 26%, to $2 billion.

The outlook was positive as well. For its fiscal first quarter, the company expects adjusted earnings of $1.15 to $1.17 a share, up 40% at the midpoint, on a 16% to 18% rise in revenue, to as much as $1.85 billion. For the full year, the revenue forecast is a tick higher, between 18% and 19%, with adjusted earnings up 19% to 22%.

Nikesh Arora

Investors liked the results. Palo Alto’s shares were rising more than 8% in after-hours trading. Shares were already up 80% on the year through the start of August.

“The report is better than feared,” Ivana Delevska, founder and chief investment officer of investment adviser Spear Invest, told me. “Guidance is light, but given the timing of the report many investors were expecting something much worse like an accounting restatement, or management change.”

Arora touted the “changing environment” that drove more customers toward “platformization,” meaning customers that buy multiple product lines. To that end, Arora said the company was surprised by the strength of its extended security intelligence and automation management, or XSIAM, product, with bookings of more than $200 million in its first year.

XSIAM, in its Cortex line, combines endpoint detection and response or EDR, security orchestration automation and response or SOAR, attack surface management or ASM, and security information and event management or SIEM technologies into a single solution. Many other companies offer these separately, which can be a pain point for customers that often must juggle many different cybersecurity products from different companies.

Despite the positive results, it’s no easy sledding these days, given high interest rates that are tamping down spending. “There is more scrutiny” on deals, Arora said. “There are some that get stretched or get canceled.”

During a 90-minute presentation, Arora dug into the evolution of what he says is a $213 billion cybersecurity market. There are new segments such as SASE, cloud security and internet of things security that contribute $29 billion, transforming segments such as endpoint and XDR as well as SIEM and network security at a collective $72 billion, steady segments such as identity, app security, data and email security at a total of $31 billion, and $81 billion in services.

“We were told customers don’t want platforms, they wanted best-of-breed solutions,” Arora noted. Instead, he said, Palo Alto is aiming to do both, through what the company calls a “build and buy” strategy, to become the largest pure-play cybersecurity provider. Cisco and Microsoft are larger, but of course cyber is just part of their businesses.

The upshot of all this is that Palo Alto looks to continue as a consolidator in this industry, along with a few others such as CrowdStrike Holdings Inc., Check Point Software Inc. and Cisco Systems Inc. The industry does seem to be splitting between larger companies continuing to grow and roll up smaller companies and others struggling to maintain traction either because of aging technology or because IT departments are diverting more spending toward AI. Just in the past week or so, Rapid7 and Secureworks laid off workers. And Arora noted that there are 3,000 cyber startups out there — clearly unsustainable.

“We believe M&A will pick up significantly in the second half and 2024 and companies like Palo Alto that have the capital availability are in a solid position to benefit,” Delevska said. “We see ‘shift left’ as a major theme for M&A, that is, cybersecurity embedded earlier in the software development cycle.”

She also thinks there will be only a limited number of industry consolidators, in particular Palo Alto and CrowdStrike. “M&A has been hit-and-miss in cybersecurity and therefore track record is key,” she said.

Going forward, Arora sees a need for, and shift to, more real-time and autonomous security. “We will see a standard platform for security,” he vowed. “That’s the only way we’re going to get to the future we need for real-time and AI-based security.”

More cyber news below.

Around the AI universe

A well-known AI skeptic raises doubts about generative AI that are worth studying even if the essential critique is, as often with Gary Marcus, points to inflated expectations more than a complete lack of utility: What if Generative AI turned out to be a Dud? Also, Benedict Evans is unimpressed so far, though it’s a bit mystifying he can’t find any good use for it. Plus, gen AI has landed right at the top of Gartner’s Hype Cycle and you know what that means.

Axios talks to larger companies struggling to implement generative AI.

Some observers even think the AI startup Gold Rush is ending: A.I. startups are losing their bloom for seed investors, argues one VC

But that seems slightly early, many startups keep on coming: Former Google researchers launch startup to build nature-inspired neural networks and Elemental Cognition, led by IBM Watson’s former head, raises $60M

It’s getting competitive on the gen AI infrastructure front: Continuing AI investment is why the GPU battle, for one, keeps intensifying — and the software matters as much as the hardware, which is why Modular could raise so much money: AI software startup Modular seeks bumper Series A round to challenge Nvidia. Of course, the big guys such as Amazon are already well into this chips-and-software race: How Amazon is racing to catch Microsoft and Google in generative A.I. with custom AWS chips. Meantime, per the New York Times, the GPU shortage rages on.

And then there’s the endlessly fundraising Databricks: Databricks looking to raise ‘hundreds of millions’ in fresh funding to fuel generative AI push But Furrier notes in theCUBE Pod podcast that it’s not out of need for cash but striking while the AI iron is hot.

For better or — in the case of the Iowa school board that wants to ban books they can’t be bothered to read — for worse, harnessing chatbots for content moderation: OpenAI finds GPT-4 can Boost online platforms’ content moderation efforts

Even the big large language model creators are looking to provide industry-specific AI models: Anthropic raises $100M from SK Telecom to build AI for telecommunications Do they become AI superclouds? And in the same vein: Arthur launches open-source tool to help companies make data-driven decisions about LLMs

About the worry over those LLM data leaks — someone’s working on that: DynamoFL raises $15.1M to tackle language model data leaks

“Hey Google, what should I do?” Google DeepMind reportedly developing at least 21 new generative AI features Not scary at all, nope.

And the hardware suppliers see an opportunity to bundle things to make AI development easier, though it’s not clear how big a market there is for this kind of thing outside the big cloud providers: Nutanix offers quick-start approach to AI development

OpenAI makes its first acquisition: OpenAI acquires digital products company Global Illumination for undisclosed price

Amazon finds some low-hanging gen AI fruit: Amazon adds AI-powered review summaries to its e-commerce marketplace

More cyber ups and downs

Cybersecurity companies still cutting costs perhaps as AI steals some budget: Cybersecurity provider Secureworks to let go 15% of its workforce, on the heels of Rapid7 layoffs last week.

Strom looks at the latest CPU attacks and concludes they will be tough to fix quickly: Mitigating the latest processor attacks will be a chore on many levels

Same deal with phishing: New reports show phishing is on the rise — and getting more sophisticated

And another security issue in IoT (maybe take the stairs next time): New widespread IoT compromise could affect millions of logic controllers

Finally, here’s detailed advice on how to avoid security fatigue: How to prevent multifactor authentication fatigue attacks

Tech economy pulse

Cisco earnings beat estimates and its stock rises a bit after-hours. At first a seemingly weak forecast from the industry bellwether raised doubts about tech infrastructure spending, but subsequent company comments and analysis indicate a good quarter and equally good outlook after all: In a positive sign for tech spending, Cisco’s stock rises on strong earnings and prospects for AI

More China economic war fallout: Intel scraps its $5.4B acquisition of Tower Semiconductor Vellante and Furrier think Intel’s in deep trouble, as they describe on theCUBE Pod. Tower wasn’t a game-changer in itself, but it’s hard to see how CEO Pat Gelsinger can revive Intel’s fortunes anytime soon.

Arm’s IPO to get rolling next month: SoftBank reportedly buys back 25% Arm stake from its Vision Fund unit

Crypto ain’t dead yet: Despite crypto downturn, BitGo raises $100M at $1.75B valuation and ZetaChain raises $27M. Plus Coinbase secures approval to offer crypto futures to US customers. And Crypto hardware wallet maker Ledger teams up with PayPal

Random bits

That was quick: SUSE to be taken private by its majority shareholder

Eliminating the decryption tax for querying encrypted data: MongoDB unveils data encryption tech for developers to boosting data privacy and compliance

Supercomputers in the cloud: Harvard researchers clone supercomputer on Google Cloud

Sassine Ghazi to become CEO of chip design software firm Synopsys

What’s coming

Big changes in Europe for big tech: Doing business in Europe? Time to focus on its new Digital Services Act – now

VMware Explore runs Aug. 21-24, and SiliconANGLE and theCUBE will be covering it in Las Vegas.

Earnings from Zoom, Nvidia, Snowflake, NetApp, Splunk, Autodesk and Workday

Then the following week, Aug. 29-31, is Google Cloud Next, also to be covered onsite at Moscone Center in San Francisco by SiliconANGLE and theCUBE.

Image: Bing Image Creator; photo: SiliconANGLE

Is the inevitable backlash against generative artificial intelligence at hand? Some early signals suggest the possibility, but you’d never know it from all the fundings and new products streaming out this week, as SiliconANGLE documented in a raft of stories this week.

We also covered the better-than-expected quarterly earnings from Cisco Systems Inc., which gave investors hope that a tech spending lull might be easing. Meantime, though, some cybersecurity companies are struggling as generative AI could be siphoning off information technology investments. Crypto isn’t dead yet despite the ongoing wintry conditions. And Intel Corp. dropped its bid for Tower Semiconductor after China’s regulators essentially nixed it — another in a string of bad news for the struggling chipmaking giant — even as Arm Ltd.’s IPO moves ahead.

For an insightful and entertaining take on this and other news in enterprise and emerging tech, check out this week’s theCUBE Pod, John Furrier’s and Dave Vellante’s weekly podcast. And this weekend, look for Vellante’s Breaking Analysis, his weekly deep dive on an enterprise tech trend.

I’ll kick things off this week with a look at the current state of the cybersecurity industry through the lens of one of its top leaders, Palo Alto Networks Inc., which announced earnings today.

As cybersecurity hits a slower patch, Palo Alto Networks charts plan to stay ahead

Palo Alto held a highly unusual presentation on its earnings and a review of its strategy today — unusual in that Friday announcements are usually reserved for bad news. Not so today, since in Palo Alto’s case, the news was plenty good. (As Chief Executive Nikesh Arora apologetically explained on the call, which was kicked off with a remix of Rebecca Black’s 2011 earworm “Friday,” he wanted to leave time to talk one-on-one with analysts over the weekend before a planned company sales meeting that starts Sunday, on top of a board meeting this week.)

Anyway, the company reported its fiscal fourth-quarter profit before certain costs such as stock compensation jumped 90% from a year ago, to $482.5 million, or $1.44 a share. Net profit hit $227.7 million, or 64 cents a share. Revenue rose 26%, to $2 billion.

The outlook was positive as well. For its fiscal first quarter, the company expects adjusted earnings of $1.15 to $1.17 a share, up 40% at the midpoint, on a 16% to 18% rise in revenue, to as much as $1.85 billion. For the full year, the revenue forecast is a tick higher, between 18% and 19%, with adjusted earnings up 19% to 22%.

Nikesh Arora

Investors liked the results. Palo Alto’s shares were rising more than 8% in after-hours trading. Shares were already up 80% on the year through the start of August.

“The report is better than feared,” Ivana Delevska, founder and chief investment officer of investment adviser Spear Invest, told me. “Guidance is light, but given the timing of the report many investors were expecting something much worse like an accounting restatement, or management change.”

Arora touted the “changing environment” that drove more customers toward “platformization,” meaning customers that buy multiple product lines. To that end, Arora said the company was surprised by the strength of its extended security intelligence and automation management, or XSIAM, product, with bookings of more than $200 million in its first year.

XSIAM, in its Cortex line, combines endpoint detection and response or EDR, security orchestration automation and response or SOAR, attack surface management or ASM, and security information and event management or SIEM technologies into a single solution. Many other companies offer these separately, which can be a pain point for customers that often must juggle many different cybersecurity products from different companies.

Despite the positive results, it’s no easy sledding these days, given high interest rates that are tamping down spending. “There is more scrutiny” on deals, Arora said. “There are some that get stretched or get canceled.”

During a 90-minute presentation, Arora dug into the evolution of what he says is a $213 billion cybersecurity market. There are new segments such as SASE, cloud security and internet of things security that contribute $29 billion, transforming segments such as endpoint and XDR as well as SIEM and network security at a collective $72 billion, steady segments such as identity, app security, data and email security at a total of $31 billion, and $81 billion in services.

“We were told customers don’t want platforms, they wanted best-of-breed solutions,” Arora noted. Instead, he said, Palo Alto is aiming to do both, through what the company calls a “build and buy” strategy, to become the largest pure-play cybersecurity provider. Cisco and Microsoft are larger, but of course cyber is just part of their businesses.

The upshot of all this is that Palo Alto looks to continue as a consolidator in this industry, along with a few others such as CrowdStrike Holdings Inc., Check Point Software Inc. and Cisco Systems Inc. The industry does seem to be splitting between larger companies continuing to grow and roll up smaller companies and others struggling to maintain traction either because of aging technology or because IT departments are diverting more spending toward AI. Just in the past week or so, Rapid7 and Secureworks laid off workers. And Arora noted that there are 3,000 cyber startups out there — clearly unsustainable.

“We believe M&A will pick up significantly in the second half and 2024 and companies like Palo Alto that have the capital availability are in a solid position to benefit,” Delevska said. “We see ‘shift left’ as a major theme for M&A, that is, cybersecurity embedded earlier in the software development cycle.”

She also thinks there will be only a limited number of industry consolidators, in particular Palo Alto and CrowdStrike. “M&A has been hit-and-miss in cybersecurity and therefore track record is key,” she said.

Going forward, Arora sees a need for, and shift to, more real-time and autonomous security. “We will see a standard platform for security,” he vowed. “That’s the only way we’re going to get to the future we need for real-time and AI-based security.”

More cyber news below.

Around the AI universe

A well-known AI skeptic raises doubts about generative AI that are worth studying even if the essential critique is, as often with Gary Marcus, points to inflated expectations more than a complete lack of utility: What if Generative AI turned out to be a Dud? Also, Benedict Evans is unimpressed so far, though it’s a bit mystifying he can’t find any good use for it. Plus, gen AI has landed right at the top of Gartner’s Hype Cycle and you know what that means.

Some observers even think the AI startup Gold Rush is ending: A.I. startups are losing their bloom for seed investors, argues one VC

But that seems slightly early, many startups keep on coming: Former Google researchers launch startup to build nature-inspired neural networks and Elemental Cognition, led by IBM Watson’s former head, raises $60M

It’s getting competitive on the gen AI infrastructure front: Continuing AI investment is why the GPU battle, for one, keeps intensifying — and the software matters as much as the hardware, which is why Modular could raise so much money: AI software startup Modular seeks bumper Series A round to challenge Nvidia. Of course, the big guys such as Amazon are already well into this chips-and-software race: How Amazon is racing to catch Microsoft and Google in generative A.I. with custom AWS chips. Meantime, per the New York Times, the GPU shortage rages on.

And then there’s the endlessly fundraising Databricks: Databricks looking to raise ‘hundreds of millions’ in fresh funding to fuel generative AI push But Furrier notes in theCUBE Pod podcast that it’s not out of need for cash but striking while the AI iron is hot.

For better or — in the case of the Iowa school board that wants to ban books they can’t be bothered to read — for worse, harnessing chatbots for content moderation: OpenAI finds GPT-4 can Boost online platforms’ content moderation efforts

Even the big large language model creators are looking to provide industry-specific AI models: Anthropic raises $100M from SK Telecom to build AI for telecommunications Do they become AI superclouds? And in the same vein: Arthur launches open-source tool to help companies make data-driven decisions about LLMs

About the worry over those LLM data leaks — someone’s working on that: DynamoFL raises $15.1M to tackle language model data leaks

“Hey Google, what should I do?” Google DeepMind reportedly developing at least 21 new generative AI features Not scary at all, nope.

And the hardware suppliers see an opportunity to bundle things to make AI development easier, though it’s not clear how big a market there is for this kind of thing outside the big cloud providers: Nutanix offers quick-start approach to AI development

OpenAI makes its first acquisition: OpenAI acquires digital products company Global Illumination for undisclosed price

Amazon finds some low-hanging gen AI fruit: Amazon adds AI-powered review summaries to its e-commerce marketplace

More cyber ups and downs

Cybersecurity companies still cutting costs perhaps as AI steals some budget: Cybersecurity provider Secureworks to let go 15% of its workforce, on the heels of Rapid7 layoffs last week.

David Strom warns of a deadline for EU privacy regulations next week: Doing business in Europe? Time to focus on its new Digital Services Act – now

Strom looks at the latest CPU attacks and concludes they will be tough to fix quickly: Mitigating the latest processor attacks will be a chore on many levels

Same deal with phishing: New reports show phishing is on the rise — and getting more sophisticated

And another security issue in IoT (maybe take the stairs next time): New widespread IoT compromise could affect millions of logic controllers

Finally, here’s detailed advice on how to avoid security fatigue: How to prevent multifactor authentication fatigue attacks

Tech economy pulse

Cisco earnings beat estimates and its stock rises a bit after-hours. At first a seemingly weak forecast from the industry bellwether raised doubts about tech infrastructure spending, but subsequent company comments and analysis indicate a good quarter and equally good outlook after all: In a positive sign for tech spending, Cisco’s stock rises on strong earnings and prospects for AI

More China economic war fallout: Intel scraps its $5.4B acquisition of Tower Semiconductor Vellante and Furrier think Intel’s in deep trouble, as they describe on theCUBE Pod. Tower wasn’t a game-changer in itself, but it’s hard to see how CEO Pat Gelsinger can revive Intel’s fortunes anytime soon.

Arm’s IPO to get rolling next month: SoftBank reportedly buys back 25% Arm stake from its Vision Fund unit

Crypto ain’t dead yet: Despite crypto downturn, BitGo raises $100M at $1.75B valuation and ZetaChain raises $27M. Plus Coinbase secures approval to offer crypto futures to US customers. And Crypto hardware wallet maker Ledger teams up with PayPal

Random bits

That was quick: SUSE to be taken private by its majority shareholder

Eliminating the decryption tax for querying encrypted data: MongoDB unveils data encryption tech for developers to boosting data privacy and compliance

Supercomputers in the cloud: Harvard researchers clone supercomputer on Google Cloud

Sassine Ghazi to become CEO of chip design software firm Synopsys

What’s coming

VMware Explore runs Aug. 21-24, and SiliconANGLE and theCUBE will be covering it in Las Vegas.

Earnings from Zoom, Nvidia, Snowflake, NetApp, Splunk, Autodesk and Workday

Then the following week, Aug. 29-31, is Google Cloud Next, also to be covered onsite at Moscone Center in San Francisco by SiliconANGLE and theCUBE.

Image: Bing Image Creator; photo: SiliconANGLE