Paul Nicholson
Research VP, Cloud & Data Center Networking, IDCPaul Nicholson is IDC’s Research Vice President, Cloud and Datacenter Networks. He provides thought leadership and actionable insights on Cloud and Datacenter Networking markets and technologies. Paul has a deep understanding of the networking market along with its business and application requirements, technologies, product roadmaps, competitive differentiation, and go-to-market strategies, enabling him to provide informed guidance for vendors, cloud providers, enterprise IT buyers and practitioners.
Paul works closely with IDC's Enterprise Networking, Server, Cloud and Security research teams on assessing the impact of emerging IT, networking, and interconnect infrastructures. Paul’s research covers major technology areas such as datacenter switching, application delivery infrastructure (including ADCs and ADCaaS/IaaS load balancing), hybrid and multicloud networking, SDN/network virtualization, network automation, InfiniBand, and cloud-native networking and network services (including service mesh, ingress controllers, and eBPF/Cilium). Paul provides ongoing research for IDC’s Continuous Information Service (CIS), Market Analysis and Forecasts, Custom Consulting, and client Go-To-Market Initiatives.
A focus in Paul’s research is to understand the impact of emerging technologies, such as generative AI and AI/ML, on the cloud and datacenter networking market, and to showcase the path to enabling business outcomes across the enterprise and service provider landscape.