There seem to be a lot of forces battering the enterprise networking space this year, and we’re only halfway through January. What makes things difficult is that many of these forces are kind of under the radar, at least in terms of the extent to which their impacts are obvious. They’re also embryonic; there are still questions about just how far and how fast they’ll push us. But push they will, so I want to look at some of the macro trends they’re creating and where we might end up by the end of 2014.
One obvious thing is that we’re continuing a long-standing trend away from “networking-as-we-knew-it”, which was the connection of sites using static resources and company-owned devices. What we have today is the notion of service connectivity not site connectivity. Service connectivity means that we project higher-level services through delivery mechanisms that are loosely equivalent to private networks, but only loosely. Arguably, for the enterprise, the service connectivity trend is the most important trend of all because it transforms what people spend money on—the most basic driver of technology policy.
Mobility, both in terms of road-warrior in-the-hotel stuff and in the more modern sense of mobile broadband, is the biggest new driver of service connectivity. Workers all sitting at their desks or standing at terminals creates a wonderful orderly picture of technology, but it’s obsolete. There are places where this happy situation still prevails—retail banking for example—but even in these places we’re seeing practices steal importance from the model. How many do online banking instead? We are clearly heading for a time when “going to the bank” is anachronistic like “going to the store” is already becoming anachronistic.
The cloud also boosts the notion of service connectivity by converting business applications into a network-delivered utility. We are “Internet-izing” our view of how workers relate to company information and information processing, and this view encourages us to farm out or distribute resources. Combine it with mobility and you create an enterprise where people are wherever they happen to be, supported by whatever they happen to need, based on technology located wherever it’s convenient. Build a private network to support that? Never happen.
But what does service connectivity look like? The answer goes back to the Internet. Most people see the Internet not as a network at all but as a collection of resources. If they have any network-centric vision, it’s that the Internet is their access connection, and that is exactly what’s happening with the enterprise. In days of old, you bought connection services that tended to map 1:1 with access connections. That’s not going to work now, not only because “services” now don’t have any specific connectivity map but also because it’s contrary to the emerging business model of the operator.
How many times have we read that network operators want more “agile” services? We want, they say, to cut provisioning time from weeks to seconds. Great, and I understand why that is. If technology is to be optimally useful it has to be available when it’s needed. However, if we stay with the presumed 1:1 service/access mapping, then we have physical provisioning to do every time we want to deliver something new. That’s not going to happen in seconds no matter how powerful we make service automation. So we have to shift policies. If you have consumer broadband over fiber or CATV, you likely can go online and in a very short period upspeed your service. Why? Because the physical media doesn’t have to change for the new speed, and because the access rate is determined by an agile edge interface that can be dialed up simply.
We don’t see this a lot today but we will see it more often in the future, largely because of regulatory changes. Regulators like the FCC are actively planning to support the migration away from TDM voice. If we don’t have TDM voice, we won’t likely have much TDM at all, and the loss of TDM is the removal of the greatest barrier to access consolidation at the business site level. If we move everything to a packet trunk using whatever technology looks good, we can then dial the access bandwidth up as needed (even make it variable over the span of days, to accommodate business factors) and deliver a bunch of services in parallel over the same pipe. The enterprise, not just branch offices but even headquarters, is moving to having a service access connection that’s not linked to any specific connectivity at all—just to services.
This has potentially profound implications for business services, particularly things like carrier Ethernet. We can surely use an Ethernet pipe for our universal business access conduit to services, but first we don’t have to and second a lot of the features of Ethernet won’t matter. What does end-to-end management mean when you’re using Ethernet only across the last mile? Nothing, obviously. In fact, management of “networking” is meaningless in this kind of world because you’re really consuming services that might include connection-based delivery but probably include more higher-level stuff—stuff that’s really what you want in the first place. Manage what you care about; if the “service” of connectivity breaks it’s broken because it’s not connecting you to your experiences. That’s the operator’s problem. So traditional enterprise network management becomes less meaningful.
Which drives managed services. If enterprises have fewer network devices of their own to manage, there’s less incentive to manage anything at all. If you add to that the fact that the “services” workers are consuming are composed of a bunch of interfaces that are fulfilled across a mixture of company facilities and cloud facilities, you realize that service continuity is beyond the ken of the enterprise anyway. Why not just let the operator manage the little bit of networking that’s stuck on your premises?
You can see where we’re headed here. The whole networking world is changing. The change won’t be complete at the end of this year, but I think the change will be visible by then, impacting both the enterprise buyer and their vendors.