Was November the month of Broadcom? Maybe not to the rest of the world, but it felt like it in the tech world. After promising to do things differently this time at the beginning of the month in our top story, the company finally closed out its deal to acquire VMware on the 22nd, which made fifth place on our list this month.

In other top news from November, Palo Alto Networks upgraded its existing on-premises management tool Panorama. The new tool, dubbed Strata Cloud Manager, extends the capabilities of Panorama by leveraging cloud, artificial intelligence (AI) and zero-trust capabilities.

Our third-place story was written by Dell'Oro analyst Mauricio Sanchez, whose expertise in enterprise security and networking makes him a frequent consultant for our writers. In this piece, Sanchez outlines the current enterprise networking landscape and how it's shifting to distributed cloud networking.

And as with every month, networking, security and telecom are top of mind and on our Top 10 list. Check it out here. Rankings are based on unique visitors aggregated during the month.

To soothe jittery nerves before the deal was finalized, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan took to the stage at the VMware Explore Barcelona event and addressed potential concerns from VMware customers that his company’s pending acquisition wouldn't follow Broadcom’s historical model.

Palo Alto Networks introduced a new artificial intelligence (AI)-powered, zero-trust-based management tool, dubbed Strata Cloud Manager. The tool is designed to streamline and unify management and visibility for the vendor’s network security and secure access service edge (SASE) offerings.

The world of enterprise IT is constantly evolving, and the traditional centralized networking model no longer meets the demands of modern businesses. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated this shift toward distributed computing, ushering in the era of distributed cloud networking. In this contributed article from Dell'Oro Senior Director Mauricio Sanchez, he explores the challenges in today’s enterprise networking landscape and delves into the transformative concept of distributed cloud networking.

Extreme Networks unveiled its ExtremeCloud Universal zero-trust network access (ZTNA). The Universal ZTNA solution, which will be released in early 2024, is designed to simplify the traditionally complex and fragmented process of managing and securing user access across multiple campuses, branches and remote sites.

The $69 billion acquisition ($61 billion in cash, $8 billion assumption of debt) closed on November 22. This was 22 days after Broadcom had initially wanted to close the acquisition, but four days ahead of the “expiration of their merger agreement.” It was also 18 months after the deal was first announced.

Broadcom noted in a short statement on the closing that it had garnered “legal merger clearance in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, the European Union, Israel, Japan, South Africa, South Korea, Taiwan, the United Kingdom and foreign investment control clearance in all necessary jurisdictions. There is no legal impediment to closing under U.S. merger regulations.”

“We are starting to see some wins where customers are coming to us after initially purchasing a firewall-based single vendor SASE solution that failed to deliver in the real world,” Chaudhry said, adding that the firewall-based single-vendor SASE offers the combination of SD-WAN, firewall and VPN deployed as virtual machines (VMs) in the cloud.

Palo Alto Networks announced it had entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Talon Cyber Security, an enterprise browser technology provider. This deal, reportedly worth more than $600 million, was the security giant’s latest move to augment its secure access service edge (SASE) solution by securing both managed and unmanaged devices.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) wants to push minimum broadband network benchmark speeds to 1 Gb/s, which could place tremendous pressure on current domestic broadband service and equipment providers.

The government agency recently released a notice of inquiry (NOI) for comments toward setting a national goal for minimum universal broadband network service speeds of 1 Gb/s on the downlink and 500 Mb/s on the uplink. That would be 40 times greater on the downlink and nearly 167 times faster on the uplink compared to the 25 Mb/s downlink, 3 Mb/s uplink speed benchmark that was established in 2015.

AT&T is still in the midst of a multi-billion-dollar 5G network build, but as with the rest of the telecommunications industry, is starting to look at what 6G will bring and how it will be used and monetized. That last part is important as operators struggle through monetizing their ongoing 5G investments.

For years, vendors have been arguing that it’s important for organizations to consider IPv6 for SD-WAN, though adoption of IPv6 overall has lagged. According to the latest figures from Google for November 2023, less than half of Google‘s users access Google services over IPv6.

Though IPv6 does not currently represent the majority of global internet traffic, it’s not a capability that SD-WAN users should ignore either.

“Support for IPv6 is increasing in importance as most vendors have at least partial support,” Jonathan Forest, vice president analyst at Gartner told SDxCentral. “From an enterprise customer standpoint, its importance remains mixed.”