Opengear CTO Doug Wadkins On The ‘Super Disruptive’ AI Data Center Opportunity And What’s Next

Wadkins stepped into Opengear’s CTO seat in April and the technology leader has been on a mission to break down data silos for AI operations as AI impacts the provider of network monitoring, data center and IT infrastructure management’s own innovation roadmap.

Opengear appointed former vice president of product management and technology Douglas Wadkins to chief technology officer in April, and the technology leader has been on a mission to further the company’s network resilience, out-of-band management, and secure remote access prowess, especially as enterprise infrastructure becomes more distributed and disrupted by AI.

Wadkins, for his part, has deep expertise in unified communications, IoT, mobile networking and security, and he’s bringing his technical know-how and business acumen into his new role at Piscataway, N.J.-based Opengear. Now, however, the provider of network monitoring, data center and IT infrastructure management is seeing where it needs to go as AI operations become a priority for more businesses. From Wadkins’ perspective, the strategy revolves around the importance of breaking down data silos for AI operations, the impact of AI on network infrastructure, and the growth in enterprise data center investments.

Wadkins, who’s been at Opengear for the past four years, recently spoke with CRN about his new role as CTO, how the disruption caused by the introduction of AI translates into huge opportunities for the company and for partners, and what the channel-friendly company is seeing around AI and data center investment.

Here are excerpts from the conversation.

What have you been focused on since coming into the CTO role?

I think one of the things is really [about] advancing our technology roadmap and focusing on that. Everyone knows that AI is the thing and if you look at it, it’s always kind of fascinating to me if you think about the waves of innovation. Everything is just really compressed because we went from thousands of years between these innovation waves back in the day — It literally would take thousands of years to really progress to the point that we’re compressing now into decades in this age of information and age of AI that we’re at the beginning of. It’s super disruptive, and anytime you’ve got that kind of thing, that’s a huge opportunity. So, how you leverage that happens to be one of my primary focuses.

I think Opengear has had a very unique place to play in that particular environment. You hear about AI operations from a from an IT perspective or OT perspective, but those agents need data. Today, data exists in silos. How do you break down those data silos between network operations, security operations, facilities and operations? They’ve all got their own data silo and that’s one of the reasons Opengear and using out-of-band as a mechanism to bring that data together is a real opportunity to be able to feed that up into the agentic AI systems that will be used for AI operations.

Does Opengear still see itself as a ‘complementary attach’ to leading networking products, like Cisco?

Your primary use case has been deploying the switches to do management. The largest supplier of that is still Cisco in switching, even though it changes in different segments a little bit — Juniper is behind them, and Extreme is gaining more share in the in the campus networks, etc. But, yeah, it’s plugging into that.

But the other thing that we’re used for is really plugging into the server side of the equation because the vast majority of the growth is coming in data center. A lot of that’s being driven by the AI investment that’s happening. You’re pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into this stuff — Microsoft alone is at $80 billion. That infrastructure growth is what drives a lot of the demand. And then it’s really being able to use those things we’re attached to, to pull information and data, is where I think this becomes much more interesting. The other thing we’re used for is the sensors. And this is primarily, again, in the data center, where it could be a door open sensor on a rack, it could be environmental monitoring, it could be power monitoring, all of those things, they’ll actually pull that up through the out-of-band network.

How is AI impacting Opengear’s own innovation trajectory?

You’re seeing investment going into these AI data centers. The other interesting thing that’s happening, if you look at larger enterprises who have a lot of data in regulated environments — insurance and banks are great examples of this — for them to be able to run AI, they need to train models, and what they’re finding is the movement of data out of the public cloud is too expensive, and they’re starting to move their data back on-premise, which means that you’re going to see a shift, especially, I think, in those industries, towards going to go into some kind of colocation [strategy], where they’re building out their own infrastructure and then they can keep control of the data from a privacy perspective and train models on top of it at a much lower expense. It’s significant enough that that’s kind of changing and shifting a little bit where investments being made. The other impact I was mentioning earlier, agentic AI, is something you can run today. Microsoft certainly has it. You can plug it into your email with Outlook and get kind of an effective executive assistant if you want to call that. It can handle setting up meetings, it can do those kinds of things, and it has the data to be able to do it, because Microsoft’s plugged that into the office 365 suite. When you move towards a world of AI operations, whether it be in a telco network, or whether it be an enterprise network or even [within] the cloud service providers, you’ve got to get access to the data, and that’s where I think there’s this converged platform play that will come in. We definitely see a demand and the security implications are quite serious because you don’t want bi-directional communication in your sensor side of things, you need bi-directional communication on your management control side of things, so how you segment the traffic and all of those things becomes quite interesting.

I do think there’s a play here, by the way, for integrators and channel partners specifically in this space. We’ll be down at Cisco Live in June and we invited one of our partners over from Germany. And the reason is, [systems integrator] SVA basically has a predefined rack that they build, and it’s got a sensor suite built into that — all of your power management is built into it. They use the out-of-band network pull that sensor data in. They branded that and rolled that out into their customer base. They’ve got a little kind of quarter rack that they targeted towards retail and full-sized racks that are going into different deployment scenarios, and they’ve got all the power monitoring, visibility, etc., all kind of baked into that solution. Those are the kinds of things that I think are kind of really interesting, because it gives that customer kind of that one touch — buy a rack that’s got prebuild management. A push the button kind of [solution].

What’s next for Opengear from a technical perspective?

We’ve been continuing to add more value in the shorter term with the traditional out-of-band solution. Secure, remote access and how we build out your data path. That independent management data path that allows you to put control traffic and other kinds of traffic over that. Being able to segregate it the way you need to from a security perspective; we continue to build on top of that. And then, some of the early work we’re starting on is really this unified platform that aggregates data from multiple different sources, so you can go to the OT side of a data center, your operations technology side of it, which is more your power, your environmental factors, and being able to converge that with the IT side, and pull all of that together. That’s where it really gets to AI operations and you’ve got to have something like that. So that’s where we’re directionally pointed.

What’s your message to partners?

The thing that I find probably most interesting from the partner perspective is their ability to aggregate something that’s got value to it and just make it really easy from the customer’s perspective. I think that’s where they can add a ton of value in bringing those things together. A lot of deployments that you go in, they may have some kind of sensor suite, but if you can build that out [and] integrate it, I think that’s a lot of it. The partners are typically super close to their customers. They’ve got a good feel for what’s kind of happening in the market and directing things along. I think the management aspect of that, how that happens, making that easy and making it so it just works is really what the message is. No one wants to spend a ton of money or time building out and managing, but it has to be there.