A Cisco executive cites five network technologies as critical for enterprises in 2019, according to a Cisco blog and a Network World article. In fact, these five will be game-changers according to Cisco’s VP of engineering, so “2019 is going to be a transformative year in enterprise networking.” What are these technologies, and is Cisco playing this straight or engaging in its usual marketing hype game? Cisco says that the five are “Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax), 5G, “digitized spaces”, SD-WAN and Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML) for network management.” Do enterprises agree, and do I? We’ll look at each of the five, and a hidden point as well.
WiFi 6 is a fairly significant upgrade to WiFi to provide increased device density within a WiFi zone, and to provide for deterministic packet scheduling to improve some aspects of application performance. The big question isn’t whether it’s useful, but whether it’s transformative, and on that front, I think it misses the mark.
The biggest advantages of WiFi 6 are related to device density; you can handle more users within a single WiFi “zone”. That has benefits, to be sure, but we’ve long had the ability to multiply user capacity by increasing the number of WiFi hubs. In addition, WiFi 6 will require upgrades to devices for it to be useful, and it will take years for these upgrades to roll out.
Vendors (including Cisco) probably love the notion of WiFi 6 because it is a driver of upgrades, but WiFi is so ubiquitous that making any fundamental changes to its specifications will take way too long for it to qualify as a game-changer…unless you’re playing a very slow game.
5G doesn’t need much of an introduction or explanation. Like WiFi 6, it’s an upgrade to current specifications; in this case for cellular broadband. Like WiFi 6, it offers both improved performance per user and improved density of users, and like WiFi 6 it requires a new set of devices (smartphones, primarily) to fully realize its benefits.
There are 5G opportunities, though, and they are transformational at least in potential. They’re just not what Cisco thinks they are. It’s going to take a long time for 5G to “transform” mobile broadband, if indeed it ever does. We don’t know how much increased broadband bandwidth operators will be prepared to offer under current unlimited plans. We don’t know how quickly new handsets can be socialized. All we know is that 5G/FTTN hybrids based on millimeter-wave technology have the potential to transform home video delivery and even branch networking.
Network World called Cisco’s “digitized spaces” “geolocation”, which I think trivializes the concept, but Cisco’s example was almost totally focused on location data. The concept that I think is important is what I’ve called “contextualization”, meaning giving applications a fuller understanding of what users/workers are actually doing at the moment, as a means of improving the relevancy of information or the interpretation of requests.
Context makes ads more valuable, applications more useful, information more relevant. It’s true that location is a part of context, even a big part, but it’s far from being sufficient to reap the rewards that contextualization could provide. Given the extraordinary value of context (“digital spaces”, or the creation of a virtual “goal-world” in which users can be said to be living) it’s surprising to me that Cisco doesn’t see it in its entirety. More so, perhaps, since as a server/cloud infrastructure player, Cisco could be expected to play in the broadest definition of context, which isn’t true for other network vendors.
Another concept that doesn’t need much explanation is SD-WAN, and I think it has the greatest potential to change the network game for enterprises in 2019. SD-WAN is an overlay network concept first created to support cloud hosting and later adapted (as the name suggests) to the WAN. The evolution of these overlay virtual networks means that they intersect all the hot trends in the market—you need them for the cloud, to access cloud applications, to unify worker application and information access. They’ve got pride of place, big-time.
The problem Cisco has with SD-WAN is that the narrow focus of the market today, which is simple small-branch connectivity, threatens their VPN/router market and doesn’t move the ball much in terms of improving the overall network business/benefit case. For Cisco, that makes the SD-WAN a defensive strategy—lose some sales to yourself rather than to someone else.
SD-WAN’s importance is either a fallacy or it’s because of the network-as-a-service (NaaS) mission I’ve blogged so often about. Cisco hasn’t supported that broader mission, so either their citing of SD-WAN as a game-changer means there’s change coming in Cisco’s SD-WAN strategy, or that Cisco is just washing the market with hype.
AI and machine learning for network management is the final point, and perhaps the prediction that rivals SD-WAN for the most potential as a game-changer for enterprise networking. Operations complexity and cost is not only holding back new technology innovations, it’s also eating up more money than capital cost of equipment. I blogged yesterday about the integration of AI and simulation into network operations automation, and that role could be decisive.
Cisco’s definition of AI in network management seems to focus on a mixture of analytics and complex event processing. Yes, it’s helpful to be able to look for patterns of events to determine whether something is going wrong before things get too far and something actually fails. Yes, that’s something AI might be able to do. However, artificial intelligence is the current UFO of technology; it’s not landing in your yard and presenting itself for inspection, so you can assign to it any characteristics you find exciting or helpful in your marketing. Machine learning has to learn stuff. It would be a lot smarter to have the pump primed by something like simulation than to just wait till “I Robot” finally gets smart enough to be useful.
There’s an unnamed fifth thing in Cisco’s litany, which is IoT. We had a recent article in Light Reading that noted that cable TV is looking toward growth in the number of households for a longer market ramp. That’s logical given that you don’t typically have multiple cable TV subscriptions per household; it reflects the reality of “total addressable market” or TAM. The same thing exists in the Internet, in wireless broadband. If you want Internet growth, you need growth in the things that use it. IoT promises billions of new Internet devices, right?
Well, you all know what I think about that. What IoT will do, and is already doing, is add some new applications to the Internet and to smartphones. Many of those new apps will potentially enhance the notion of digitized space or context, which reinforces my point that it’s context that really matters here.
Cisco is right about one thing, which is that smartphones and computers have already become extensions of people, and are on the way to defining their own parallel universe, a universe we all live in along with our lives in the real world. In some ways (augmented or artificial reality, for example) we might explicitly inhabit that digital world, but in all ways we’ll draw on the digital universe to guide our behavior in the real world. That’s truly transformational, and since all of Cisco’s five trends augment that digital universe, we can say that Cisco is right. On the other hand, Cisco is dissecting the digital universe in their vision, separating the pieces that should be and must be mutually supporting to achieve anything. In that respect, Cisco is wrong. Is it lack of vision, or is it simply a sales-driven company trying to break down something big and complex so that the pieces can be sold more easily? You can call that one for yourself.