Ilona Gabinsky
VP of Marketing,
Aviz Networks
Monday, February 23, 2026 | 11:00AM–12:00PM ET | Online
Webinar | Open Networking for Higher Ed: How to Evaluate, Pilot, and De-risk SONiC
This webinar is a part of the EDUCAUSE Industry Insights series.
Higher education networks must deliver uptime and stronger security visibility while budgets and staffing stay tight. Hear from Zaid Kahn, CEO of Neuron Factory and former VP at LinkedIn and Microsoft, who brought SONiC into production at LinkedIn to gain deeper telemetry and faster incident resolution during critical incidents. Featuring NYU with Robert Pahle, Senior Research Scientist, you’ll learn why a university is adopting SONiC, where it fits in a higher ed environment, and the practical lessons that matter for campus teams.
We will cover the most common adoption challenges customers face, including hardware and feature fit, observability and troubleshooting, upgrades, and operational support. You will also learn what choices institutions have for sourcing SONiC builds, how those builds are packaged, and what that means for lifecycle management, qualification and interoperability testing. Finally, we will show how AI can be used in troubleshooting as well as auditing your networks.
We will translate those lessons into higher education networks focusing on where to start, how to measure success, how to plan upgrades and rollback, and how to reduce risk through qualification and interoperability testing.
Learning Outcomes:
- What SONiC is and why higher ed teams are evaluating open networking
- Identify the most common SONiC adoption challenges customers face in deployment and operations
- Describe options for sourcing SONiC builds.
- Evaluate hardware ASIC and feature choices that impact interoperability and life cycle.
- Learn where you can test SONiC quality across vendors, platforms, and configurations.
- Discover AI can be used to troubleshoot and audit your networks.
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