While I love a good story, I love data even more. I also love helping enterprise IT decision-makers such as leaders, experts, and operators (LEOs) (LEOs) and organizations advance their goals through smart technology adoption. This is why for the last five years, we’ve been focused on building a modern data platform for SDxCentral so we can understand what’s happening in the technology market and why we share these insights with you.

This hyperfocus on building out the data platform forced some trade-offs such as holding off on refreshing the technology topics in our navigation and newsletters so we could accurately reflect what’s most important to you. The result is that unlike some tech media sites that refresh topics based on vendor advertising spending, we waited to use our data to pinpoint what technologies are really important to LEOs at large enterprises, hyperscalers and telecoms.

We also used this opportunity to leverage the data to experiment with how to make the SDxCentral experience more efficient at helping you stay current. Why? Like all of us, you are busy, tasked with doing more with less, and expected to know a lot about a lot. Realizing that time is our most limited resource, we’ve focused on how to help you stay current with trusted insights while minimizing the impact on your time.

What’s trending with tech leaders at enterprises, hyperscalers and telecoms? Methodology

Using our private audience engagement data, we asked, “What topics generate the most and least engagement by LEOs at enterprise, hyperscalers and telecoms?” We compared this with content produced over the last 12 months with content generated over the last 10 years to make sure our analysis wasn’t biased by recent articles on a fresher topic than an older topic.

High-priority themes

The top three themes for the cross-functional LEOs visiting SDxCentral are networking, security and cloud, followed closely by artificial intelligence (AI). The first three have consistently jockeyed among the top three slots for almost three years while AI has spiked over the last 15 months. The next three leading priorities are data center, enterprise and telecom. A year ago these were 5G, edge and secure access service edge (SASE). This shift can be explained by our deliberate effort to relate technology trends by industry segment, which we use to guide our content roadmap, ensuring we are continually guiding you through your most pressing priorities.

LEO technologies priorities

The top technology-specific priority of LEOs on SDxCentral over the last 12 months is SASE. Based on our data, following SASE, the next five technology priorities consumed on SDxCentral are:

• Data: The old ways of transporting, processing, storing and securing data to meet business objectives no longer work. The inputs to make a good infrastructure decision to maximize your data has never been more complex.
• Edge: Traditionally, edge was mostly about networking and security technologies (which is why LEO lost interest in it for a while). Today, it’s more about putting the right application and compute resources in the right place to meet a business objective making Edge a meaningful business topic.
• MCNS: multicloud networking software is the glue that connects everything from end users to applications from the edge to the cloud and the data center. The strategic importance to every enterprise, telecom and hyperscaler can’t be overstated.
• Security Operations (SecOps):  Today, security is everyone’s responsibility and that responsibility is quarterbacked by SecOps professionals who guide cross-functional domains based on the most pressing threats. This means that DevOps pros need to know a lot about how to engage their cross-functional partners. It also means these partners need to know how their security peers address issues to minimize the impact on the speed of business.
• XDR: Security pros have lots of tools, none more important than extended detection and response (XDR), which represent the convergence of a slew of legacy technologies. How organizations navigate this convergence has a strategic impact on the organization’s security posture, expense footprint of the entire technology function, and business operations.

Normally, we’d include a spiking topic, such as AI networking, in this list given its explosive growth. However, learning from experience, before we expand this into a topic, we need more data to sift through the confusion created by the lack of consensus and vendor fear, uncertainty and doubt around all things relating to AI and networking. You can see its influence based on the list of secondary topics trending on SDxCentral, including:

• Automation
• Ethernet
• Fixed wireless
• Infiniband
• high-performance computing (HPC)
• Machine Learning
• Managed services
• network-as-a-service (NaaS)
• Observability
• Quantum

Topics remaining flat include 5G, private wireless, RAN and SD-WAN. None of this should be a surprise. 5G hasn’t positively changed telecom economics and RAN + OpenRAN are currently stuck. Private networks are relevant to a very specific slice of enterprises and SD-WAN is being incorporated into SASE.

One topic that’s worth mentioning with a significant decrease in engagement is sustainability. From my perspective, the primary reason it’s always been squishy — beyond hyperscalers and corporate board initiatives — is because there isn’t how much value there is for the end customers and how to make it actionable for LEOs. Maybe sustainability gets a second life though I suspect that the real topic of conversation is efficiency as that’s something that can be measured and optimized.

Data-driven changes to your SDxCentral experience

We are using this data to make SDxCentral more efficient and relevant for you. First, we are making finding content related to data, edge, DevOps, XDR and MCNS easier by creating new Topic Hubs and adding them to the header bar. We also added bubbles with counts so you can see at a glance which topics have new fresh updates. The goal is to make it easier for LEOs like you to easily stay informed.

Second, we’ve started modernizing the organization of topic hubs to be more impactful and efficient with your time. Specifically, we shifted from organizing by content type (news, analysis, etc) by related topics. You can see the first implementation of the format on Data and DevOps. We’ll be refreshing the rest over the coming months.

Third, some topics have migrated off the header bar. We are continuing coverage in these areas and relating them to technologies relevant to today’s challenges. You can access these topics by visiting the Networking, Security, Cloud, or Telecom topic hubs and scanning the related topics at the top right of the page.

Fourth, we’ve updated the newsletters we produce each week to better reflect these topics. Don’t worry you don’t need to take action — if you subscribe to weekly newsletters being sunsetted, our AI-driven platform will shift you to the replacement weekly newsletter. For example, if you subscribe to SD-WAN, you’ll be shifted to the SASE newsletter. However, we recommend that everyone update their newsletter preferences so you only receive emails that align with your current interests.

How do you make this actionable for you?

• Join 185,000 SDxCentral members who are staying current with trends with our newsletters and members-only articles. Update your newsletter preferences to stay current on the trending topics important to you.
• Check out the refreshed technology topics and modernized layouts on topics important to you. Bookmark these pages so you don’t have to hunt and peck.
• Let us know what you think. Connect with your favorite editors or drop me an email or DM on Linkedin.