Are we heading toward a union of network and IT concepts, vendors, and even infrastructure? Over the last two decades, companies have slowly pulled networking and IT into a common organization, and today the “software-defined” technologies seem to be uniting the two spaces for service providers and the cloud players. Is this trend real, is it a good thing, and what might it mean to tech overall?
Networking has been subducted. When I started doing enterprise surveys, I had a survey base of 300 companies, and in the first survey I did, 254 of them said that network and IT were separate buying authorities in their organizations. In my most recent survey of 220 companies, 212 said the two were combined. For 20 years, enterprises have said that the largest factor in establishing network policy and exercising strategic influence was the data center. Today, more companies tell me that their key IT vendors (servers, platform software, virtualization, etc.) drive network decisions than say that Cisco and other network vendors do.
Why has this happened? Digging through the survey history I’ve accumulated, what I find is that three major factors have driven the change we’re seeing. I think we learn the most by taking them in the order they appear, chronologically.
The first influence I find in my surveys dates from the late 1980s, and it’s the shift to IP networks as the baseline strategy for private networking. Up to this point, computer vendors like IBM had their own unique networking strategy, which meant that data networking tended to be divided among the computer vendors, and tightly coupled to them. Transport networking, what companies bought in the way of services to create connections, tended to be based on TDM, and carried voice and data traffic. Since the data side was so balkanized, TDM and voice kept networks independent. When IP came along and quickly took over as the data network model, it unified all the data center forces on a single network approach, and that reduced the forces that separated voice and data. Of course, IP ultimately started to carry voice, too.
The second influence the surveys show is the substitution of virtual private networks for private networks. When IP started its climb toward supremacy, it was used to build private networks by combining routers with TDM connections. VPN services, meaning primarily IP VPNs but also VLANs, created a service that included transit switching and routing, and so eliminated a lot of “interior” nodes. What was left was a bunch of access routers in remote locations, and bigger data center routers at points where computer systems were installed. Power follows money, and not only did this reduce pure network capex, it also put the biggest-ticket items in the place where the IT organization ran the show.
The next influence was componentization and service-and-microservice technology. When applications are monolithic, there is a sharp boundary between network and application—the network gets you to the data center where the applications are run. Separation of networking and IT is still possible because of that. When you start to build applications from services, meaning that you componentize applications and link the pieces with network connections, then more and more of “the network” is internal to IT. Not only that, this internal network is now critical in sustaining QoE, and network features like load-balancing and failover are now linked to what’s seen by users as application behavior. Obviously, the cloud extends this particular influence, and expands it greatly.
The final influence, the one that’s raising its head most dramatically today, is security. In modern distributed and cloud applications, it’s increasingly difficult to separate network security and IT security, since both are really targeting the protection of critical IT assets and resources. What makes this particular influence so interesting is that it’s directly driving competing initiatives from network and IT vendors already. Not only does the space conceptually unite IT and network, the offerings are competitive too.
The competitive theme here is also moving backward, so to speak, through the earlier influences uniting network and IT. Virtualization in general has generated virtual networking initiatives in parallel with server virtualization. VMware’s NSX is derived from Nicira, which came about to create large-scale multi-tenant data centers with totally separated virtual networks. Kubernetes has virtual network add-ons, so does OpenStack, and so do the service mesh technologies.
The virtual network, then, is perhaps the single thing that’s framing the union of IT and network. A virtual network looks like a “network” to the user, but is a tenant on generalized infrastructure provided by any combination of entities playing any convenient set of roles. Separate use from realization and you see how important this can be. If a virtual network can be defined by any player, then an IT version of it is just as credible as one from a network vendor. In fact, it may be more credible, because the virtual network from the IT player is free to follow the twists and turns of IT needs, as seen by the players who know those needs best.
The new competitive avenues would seem to favor the network vendors in that they have an opportunity to jump over into another space when network spending is under pressure. Cisco, for example, has long appeared to covet a position in cloud platform software and containers. However, the true situation might be just the opposite. Network vendors have been trying to claw their way out of the box of connection infrastructure, and just as they’ve had some success, IT vendors are now more able to compete with them in that higher-layer space.
Here’s where Juniper’s position bears watching. As I’ve noted in prior blogs, Juniper has done some (uncharacteristically) savvy M&A recently, picking up players like Mist, Netrounds, 128 Technology, and Apstra. These combine to offer Juniper what may well be the most solid network-as-a-service positioning of any network vendor. If they’re rolled into a unified NaaS-like story, it could be a game-changer for Juniper, and for the space overall. Nokia also has a shot at NaaS through its long-mishandled Nuage asset.
Could a NaaS story create some headroom for the network vendors? It could also, of course, offer another and perhaps more dramatic path to success for the IT players, particularly those like VMware, who already has a virtual-network offering. Still, I think NaaS could tip the balance of opportunity more toward network vendors, simply because the IT side isn’t used to positioning technology as a new service paradigm.
This may turn out to be the battle of the budgets, too. Enterprises have steadily shifted their financial planning influence toward the IT side. If those players get a stake of the network piece of the pie, there could be big trouble in store for the leading network vendors, including Cisco. Might Cisco’s drive toward software for virtualization and the cloud be a response to this risk, an attempt to take the battle to the home ground of the IT players? It could be, and in any event, even the potential for greater network/IT fusion could be a game-changer in the market.