Smart manufacturing has many facets. There's the convergence of IT and OT, and the security challenges that brings. In recent years we've seen Private 5G coming up, at least as a topic of conversation if not in actual adoption. Finally, the edge environments of those factories recently fell under the spell of AI too.

At Mobile World Congress earlier this year, we talked to Parm Sandhu, Group Vice President of Enterprise Products and Services at NTT Data, about all of these topics. What does Edge AI bring us and is private 5G finally delivering on years of promises? And what about the security issues associated with the convergence of IT and OT? And finally, how are all these developments interconnected?

Listen to this new episode of Techzine Talks now and let us know what you think.

A little bit of a change of pace this week, as we talk about how big technology companies invest in other companies and what underpins their acquisition strategy. During Cisco Live we had the opportunity to sit down with Derek Idemoto, SVP of Corporate Development and Cisco Investments.

The pace at which Cisco launches products and services in the past four to five years is quite stunning. Especially when compared to the rather pedestrian pace at which the company moved forward prior to 2020, the difference is striking.

Cisco's strategy has never been to build everything from scratch, at least not in the past three of its four decades. It has done many acquisitions and also invests in a lot of companies. Sometimes investing turns into acquiring after a while, sometimes it doesn't.

In our chat with Idemoto, we talk about the rationale behind Cisco's approach. We specifically touch on the billion-dollar AI Investment Fund it set up last year. We dive into how Cisco determines when to invest and when to buy, what that means for the rest of the organization, what are some interesting areas of investment at the moment, and much more.

The work that Idemoto and his team are doing is a crucial part of how Cisco operates. It is therefore a crucial part to understand if one is to understand Cisco properly. If only because it means that the statement by Cisco President and CPO Jeetu Patel that Cisco is "the world's largest startup" actually holds water. It can move surprisingly quickly because of all of the investments and acquisitions, even though these also put a strain on the own organization.

Listen to this - in our humble opinion - interesting conversation now.

During PegaWorld, the annual conference where Pegasystems outlines its vision and has customers share their stories, we sat down with Pega CTO Don Schuerman and talked about what agentic AI means in the fields they're active in.

The Pega CTO sees a tendency in the industry to label anything with "a sprinkle of large language model fairy dust" as agentic AI. That's not how he and Pega look at it. He talks about a more comprehensive vision: true agentic AI designs, automates, executes, and optimizes the workflows and decisions that businesses depend on. This isn't about deploying thousands of agents indiscriminately—it's about implementing a few strategic, pragmatic agents that drive substantive business outcomes.

In this episode of Techzine Talks, we discuss the various GenAI and agentic components of Pega's platform, and how they interact to make agentic AI appealing to its customers. Pega Blueprint, a workflow designer, is an important part of it, but Pega will also add agentic capabilities to its appdev environment, and will introduce an Agentic Process Fabric to tie all of it together in an orderly and most importantly well-governed fashion.

According to Schuerman, it's a mistake to assume that underlying architecture is irrelevant in an AI-driven world. Listen to the podcast episode to hear why he thinks that is, and to hear much more about Pega's agentic vision, but more broadly also about agentic AI in general and how this relates to deployments in more challenging environments.

What happens when you study how millions of teams work and collaborate over 20 years? You learn a lot and can use those insights to help organizations operate more effectively. That's what Atlassian wants to achieve with its "System of Work" - not a product you can buy, but a framework for bringing teams together in tech-driven organizations.

Anu Bharadwaj, Atlassian's President, explains this approach to us and to you. It is built on four essential pillars: aligning work to goals, planning at scale, unleashing knowledge across silos, and making AI a natural teammate. The idea is that it all works like a box of Lego.

When we first heard about System of Work, we thought it all sounded a bit esoteric and wondered how concrete it is. As it turns out, it is very fundamental to how Atlassian approaches the market, and therefore also fundamental for (potential) customers. Even though the separate components may not change that much, the way they integrate and interact with each other will (and has already changed with the launch of several Collections).

Deeper integrations usually also have a lock-in ring to them. Bharadwaj is adamant that is not the case here, when we ask her about that.

Listen to the episode now to hear all about System of Work and what that means for tools like Jira, Confluence, Loom and Rovo AI agents and by extension for the market as a whole.

The security landscape is transforming rapidly as AI becomes embedded throughout enterprise technology stacks. Organizations (and security vendors) need to fundamentally rethink how they approach things like security governance and risk management. That's one of the pieces of advice Jonathan Trull, CISO at Qualys, has during the conversation we had at RSAC 2025 Conference. Listen to this new episode of Techzine Talks to learn more about what he had to say.

Trull draws from his experience overseeing both corporate security and product security engineering when he highlights the gap between AI implementation and security considerations. While organizations race to adopt generative AI tools, few have developed comprehensive frameworks for securing them properly.

According to Trull, many conversations tend to focus on one thing when it comes to securing AI. "Everyone tends to focus on how to prevent sensitive data going into SaaS, AI-enabled products," he says. "But what about when you're building your own LLM models? When do you do data masking? How do you incorporate security in the engineering lifecycle?" These architectural security questions deserve answers too.

At the end of the day, cybersecurity is about creating a balance. A balance between innovation and cybersecurity, and the risks that organizations are willing to take. This conversations gives you some good insights into how to tackle this. Tune in now!

AI has in interesting side-effect for the role of the CISO, says Zscaler CISO Sam Curry when we sit down with him during RSAC 2025 Conference in San Francisco earlier this month. Their input becomes more important. That's good news for CISOs. Or is it?

Security leaders haven long been judged and consulted along the technical axis. The (rapid) rise of AI means that dynamic had to change, Curry says. It had and still has an effect on cybersecurity in general that we haven't seen before, according to him. CISOs contribute to strategic discussions more and more. In fact, they're among the first to be consulted now.

Besides discussing the role of the CISO in 2025 and beyond, we draw parallels between challenges and pitfalls that beset organizations during the cloud boom, and discuss the implications of them in the AI era.

There are still so many things to look at from a security perspective when it comes to AI. That became clear again from Zscaler's survey, which showed that AI was simultaneously 2024's most adopted technology (growing over 600%) and most blocked technology. This paradox highlights the complex risk-reward calculations security leaders must navigate.

The last big topic we discuss is more forward-looking. What are the implications of the quantum era on how organizations need to look at cybersecurity? Post-quantum cryptography should be on organizations' radar. Is that the case though? What can organizations do now to prepare for this? And do they even have the resources to tackle this, while still tackling the current big wave of challenges?

Listen to this new episode of Techzine Talks and let us know what you think.

The security landscape is transforming rapidly as AI agents join our workforce, creating an urgent need to rethink how we approach identity protection. When 80% of breaches already stem from compromised identities, how do we secure virtual employees who can't use traditional multi-factor authentication?

We sat down with David Bradbury, Chief Security Officer at Okta, to discuss this topic. This is a very important discussion to have, because traditional security approaches fall short when protecting non-human identities.

We ask Bradbury what organizations need to do to protect and secure their modern environments better from an identity perspective. He outlines the essential building blocks organizations need to implement. These have to do with token authentication, fine-grained authorization, and asynchronous workflows. We also talk about the role of the human in this new framework.

Looking toward solutions, Bradbury highlights promising developments like Google's Device-Bound Session Credentials, which cryptographically bind sessions to specific devices. He also emphasizes the need for broader adoption of security standards across the SaaS ecosystem and calls on CISOs to demand better security features from vendors.

All in all, a lot of work needs to be done when it comes to protecting and securing identity moving forward in an agentic world. The first order of business is to understand what the challenges are that AI agents pose. Listening to this podcast episode is a good start, as we discuss all the fundamentals.

What if our fundamental approach to security needs rethinking? In this conversation with Tia Hopkins, Chief Cyber Resilience Officer at eSentire, we explore why resilience has become the industry's latest buzzword—and why it demands more than just lip service.

One of the mantras Hopkins doesn't particularly care for when it comes to cyber resilience is the "not if, but when" mentality that dominates security discussions every now and again. Her suggestion is to shift more from mere acceptance to acknowledgment. This may sound like a subtle distinction, but is still very powerful. It keeps teams vigilant rather than resigned.

At the heart of our discussion is a critical examination of the industry's pivot from prevention to detection and response. While this shift made sense as organizations adopted cloud environments and borderless networks, Hopkins argues it's time to correct this imbalance through comprehensive exposure management. This approach extends beyond traditional vulnerability management to encompass people, processes, and technologies, all informed by business context and threat intelligence.

For security leaders wrestling with budget constraints while trying to balance prevention and response investments, Hopkins offers practical advice: eliminate technology duplication, maximize existing capabilities, and frame security investments in business terms rather than technical specifications. Most importantly, she advocates moving beyond annual risk assessments toward dynamic, continuous evaluation that reflects the reality of today's threat landscape.

There are a lot of really good insights in this conversation. Listen to this episode now.