The network, research firm Gartner tells us, will become smarter in the next year, software will displace hardware infrastructure in importance, and the need for customer control will drive network and services growth. Networking, according to Gartner, is no longer about basic connectivity and transport. It looks like good old Sun Microsystems got it right - the network is the computer, as its famous tagline states. Now that the network is the computer, how well, exactly, is your network able to handle its new role in the spotlight?
Says Dimension Data CTO Ettienne Reynecke: “We're seeing several trends across the globe, and the network is foundational to companies participating in any of them. Virtualisation, consolidation, globalisation and so on, all impacts the network. It's no longer about the technology. This isn't a new statement, but for the first time, we're seeing network people getting this: it's about the business outcome. This is a subtle change we've started seeing as the market has matured.”
Says 3Com SA head Derek Wiggill: “We're seeing the market become more price-conscious. We're not seeing a move to Web 2.0 or any other nice-to-haves. We're seeing customers cutting back on the fluff.”
His view is supported by HP ProCurve EMEA product marketing manager Nick Hancock. “We're seeing a general tightening of budgets in the industry. CIOs are looking at what they really need to get out of their infrastructures. The trend in the past was to overinvest. Now the question is: 'What's needed to make the business run at its best?'”
Back to basics
Current cost-cutting could cause some budgetary conflict with one of the major trends Dimension Data's Reynecke is seeing: network modernisation. “The network missed out on the highest investment period of IT - pre-Y2k - as it was current enough not to need it. Post-Y2k, everything went into a holding pattern. Then, when the dotcom crash happened, everything went into another holding pattern and the network wasn't invested in again.
We're seeing customers cutting back on the fluff.
Derek Wiggill, head, 3Com
“The next inflection point was 2005 when the rise of [IP telephony] and contact centres caused people to look at investing because the network wasn't coping. Then we get to 2008 - virtualisation, consolidation, green IT, centralisation - and we're sitting with pre-1998 networks that have not been invested in and aren't going to support all this stuff.
“People are now going back and cleaning house, going back to the network at its foundations,” he says. “We're seeing maturity creep into the network space in terms of depreciating assets, regular refresh cycles and so on. We're in a downturn, and we're hearing people say: 'We need to invest. We need to get the basics right whether the markets come back or not so that when they do come back, we're ready to do the next project, whether it's Web 2.0 or virtualisation.'”
In an increasingly globalised business world, where the economic downturn is biting hard, green pressures are making themselves felt and cutting costs is king, the network is expected to solve numerous problems. Looking to cut travel costs and go green? Get into video conferencing and save time, money and air miles. Need your employees to be more productive? Hunt them down wherever they are, at low cost, by investing in unified communications. Need to sort out your 1970s-era data centre? Consolidate, centralise and virtualise, and not only will it be greener, leaner and cheaper, but employees can access anything from anywhere in the world, as long as they have a network connection. Hence Reynecke's point: the network cannot cope with all the stuff people want it to do, and it has to be upgraded.
The question is: 'What's needed to make the business run at its best?'
Nick Hancock, EMEA product marketing manager, HP ProCurve
“People need to enable quality of service,” notes HP ProCurve's Hancock. “It's not about being connected; it's about services. It's not about buying a network. Where in the past the propensity was to buy due to the number of features, customers are now asking: 'Exactly what does this do and what applications does it do it for, and at what cost - upfront and in future in terms of maintenance?'”
3Com's Wiggill agrees: “Enterprises want value in their network investments. Open standards facilitated the freedom with which they can now cherry-pick the [most valuable] components to give them the network performance they want. Prices of these standardised components will be a competitive issue. Customers are no longer locked into the perceived safety of proprietary solutions. CIOs now have the power to buy the best they can afford from a choice of vendors' products, giving them better value for their budget. They can shop more widely and challenge vendors to deliver value. The tight economy means fewer hardware purchases and a move to services platforms for networking to save costs and give businesses better control of their operations, and deploy new services faster.”
Protect and invest
Says Hancock: “This shift is very pertinent. We're seeing more emphasis on examining cost over the [product] life cycle, reliability, upgradeability and what will last seven years versus the traditional four or five.
“There's a strong emphasis on investment protection,” he adds. “CIOs are investing now because they're not sure where the next investment will come from. They're looking at products that not only meet the needs of applications today and in the future, but also products that are not overly feature-rich. We're seeing far more criticality in the network - reliability and the flexibility to change over time are critical.”
Reynecke says cost optimisation is a pivotal trend. “Technologies that drive cost out definitely have traction. It's about the impact the technology can have.”
He says Dimension Data is seeing increased demand for its managed services offering. “We're seeing a very different maturity and demand creeping into the market for the use of managed services. Companies need to do more with less. We're increasingly seeing them coming to us, asking if we can monitor, manage or maintain networks for them. We're seeing a significant change in market readiness. Conditions are adding a new level of urgency.”
A further consideration is compliance, he says: “If you have kit that even the vendors refuse to support any more, you risk non-compliance. What happens if a critical transaction fails to go through because old equipment has failed?”
HP ProCurve SA country manager Lorna Hardie sums it up: “Mobility, management, security, efficiency. These are core trends no matter what you're looking at in terms of infrastructure. They all touch each other. Customers are [increasingly] becoming aware of how infrastructure decisions impact business going forward.”
Market seesaw?
We're seeing major cost-cutting, with an equally large need to refresh the network to meet current and future needs. We're seeing the network become increasingly critical to business operations - businesses cannot operate without one these days and this is escalating - with a concurrent move to outsourcing it in a bid to drive cost down and efficiency up. Given that most of these trends are conflicting, it's going to be interesting to see which side the market seesaw lands on, and what factors push it there.
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