One Street research firm has done a particularly good job wading through the hype in tech to come up with some insights into 2020, and I think they’re worth exploring. Rather than repeat their themes, let me group them into what I think are major trends.
The first theme is that infrastructure-building will lag service-building. We tend to look at advances in networking as being the result of changes in (meaning, in most cases, increases in) infrastructure investment. Look at 5G as an example. What the research is suggesting is that what we think of “infrastructure” is less important than the specific service goals, which may result in investment in things outside the usual scope of “network infrastructure”. A “service” here is the thing that creates direct value, rather than something that’s plumbing or resources needed to build up to that value.
In networking, infrastructure is about traffic. Network spending has tended to be driven by traffic growth and by the need to improve things like security using overlay technologies like firewalls. At some point, the infrastructure reaches the point where generalized improvements don’t really justify their costs, and so you have to look at specific applications/services and their needs.
A good example of this is the impact of streaming video and other OTT services. We tend to think of the Internet as a big end-to-end IP network, but it’s really a series of metro/local delivery areas with extensive caching to support better quality of experience, linked by a wide-area component. As streaming video increases, the focus of investment lies in the delivery part, which will grow much faster than the core. Thus, CDNs and perhaps, with the proper service driver, edge computing take precedent in investment over big core routers.
The increased service focus also tends to separate out applications like unified communications and collaboration (UC/UCC) from traditional in-house implementations to a cloud-hosted, as-a-service model. Specialized applications tend to consume specialized equipment, and often it’s difficult to achieve any reasonable economy of scale in these spaces because of that specialization. In addition, support for the gear requires different training and perhaps even different teams. UCaaS is a logical response to this sort of thing; turn these specialized applications for networking into services and outsource them.
All this suggests that we may see more SaaS-style offerings, attempts to build even cloud services higher on the value chain. We’re certainly facing a CIO crisis of uncertainty with respect to how to get technologies that they accept as useful, even inevitable, into a form that businesses can actually gain value from. I had a record number of CIOs contact me in December and January on this issue, and it’s the source of the growing interest in the “Kubernetes ecosystem”.
Seen in this light, things like 5G, IoT, and edge computing are at risk in 2020, because they’re essentially technology enhancements to infrastructure in search of a service mission. Every piece of gear that gets deployed in a network has three negative effects. First, it consumes capital budget. Second, it adds to the support burden and costs, and finally it drives a depreciation stake in the ground that constrains choices on equipment because of displacement risk. The insight the research contributed here is that “build it and they will come” ignores the cost of waiting till they do, which may be a long time, if ever.
It’s not uncommon in our hype-driven technology space to be pushing technology revolutions when the benefits and business case are virtually invisible. It’s easier to write about edge computing than to write about the hundreds of things that might consume it, and the complicated issues associated with when those possible uses add up to utility. Selling a box is also easier than selling a mission, which likely will involve a bunch of customer-specific research and analysis that no salesforce wants to get involved in.
We could say that the adoption of the popular revolutionary technologies depends on that first point, the thinking about services rather than infrastructure. If you consider this point a moment, you can see that cloud success depends on the presumption that the service of hosting can be disconnected from servers. The services of networking can be similarly disconnected, and that means that consumption of architected, specialized, services is likely to become a priority with users, as the first trend point suggests. That, in turn, shifts the focus of the network from what it moves to what it benefits.
This shift favors a transition from connectivity services to managed services and then on to application/mission services. That poses a major threat to both the network operators and their vendor community, because operators have been exceptionally inept in defining higher-level services of any sort. We would not have a global community of managed service providers (MSPs) if operators globally had thought about the inevitable trend toward offloading support and operations functions. Specialization in services further complicates their situation by shifting buyer power more toward line operations people, who aren’t infrastructure buyers and don’t want to be.
The final thing I think the research is telling us is that mass use of technology can only happen if tech is dumbed down. I used to say that large organizations were masters of harnessing mediocrity, because mediocrity was the only thing you could get enough of to build a large organization. The same thing is true for technology adoption, which means that the complexity of network and IT operations grows with the scale of its adoption, and the labor pool and skill pool available to support it does not. At some point, you can’t “build it” and let them “come” because you can’t build it in the first place, and can’t keep it running while they’re on their way.
This might be a signal to the entire tech industry, at least the part that sells to businesses rather than consumers. We’ve spent decades thinking that you advanced your company’s technology by buying gear or software, and now we’re starting to think that individual missions drive mission-specific changes. That means that there has to be a strong model of technology-building based on fulfillment of missions, or you have to shift to an as-a-service plan.
This is going to have a profound impact on vendors in 2020, if it’s correct. For the enterprise, applications take precedent over infrastructure, and for the service provider, services take precedent over traffic. The challenge in both areas is two-fold. First, you need (as a vendor) to own the driver for spending, which means you have to move your sales process up the value chain, along with what you sell. Second, you need to be able to harmonize mission-agile top-end offerings with infrastructure at some point. Services, down deep, become traffic.
I think that “abstraction-think” is the best way to do this. I also think that the software industry, including at least some cloud providers, are doing a better job at framing the future than the hardware guys are. The onrush of what I’ve called the “Kubernetes ecosystem” is an example of vendor attempts to build an agile software platform for cloud-ready applications, and by doing so define the properties of those applications. This work is probably going to be the most important thing in IT in 2020.
For networking, things aren’t so clear. Network operators have resisted getting involved in “higher-level” services, and their desire to prevent vendor lock-in on infrastructure purchases has limited their ability to think above the box-level infrastructure planning they’re used to. Feature planning is the foundation of service planning, not network-building. Operators have an opportunity, in addressing this seismic shift, to gain some traction in the service and value side of the network, but they have a history of fumbling their way to defeat on this sort of issue, leaving things to the agile OTTs. I think that if this happens now, we can forget the idea of operators ever being more than plumbers, and in many areas where demand density limits network connection profitability, we may see further need for government intervention just to keep the wires humming.