As restaurants and retailers work to recover from the economic impact of the pandemic, they will be looking for efficiencies and cost-effective ways within their IT infrastructure to support new business initiatives such as BOPIS (Buy Online Pickup In Store). This will require designing a tightly integrated and managed enterprise IT solution vs. piecemeal solutions from multiple vendors since systems interoperability is critically important. To support a BOPIS model, more retailers will migrate to real-time POS (Point of Sale) inventory systems which require a strong and secure network foundation. On the vendor side, we’ll see continued consolidation and acquisition of smaller niche companies by larger vendors as they fill the gaps in their product portfolio to offer end-to-end solutions. As IoT and Edge Computing solutions are deployed, this further consolidation will allow easier on-ramp for new applications and functions. Starting with the right foundation will become increasingly more important as companies will need to scale their IT infrastructure easily. SASE is a perfect example of vendors building out additional functions beyond SD-WAN to satisfy the growing demand for secure remote access and cloud-based security. Prior [...]