Peter Coppens is the Solution Line Director for networking services. He is responsible for defining, developing and successfully launching networking services for Colt's enterprise customers. Peter has 15 years' experience in product management, go to market planning and team management.
Instant gratification is a trend of our age. We both expect and want products and services now. And this is fulfilled by a new powerful nexus of online services, smart devices, supply chains and much more.
In parallel with the consumer revolution, there’s a sea change in what enterprise IT organisations expect from computing and storage services. Virtualisation in data centres, on the desktop and the shift of data and apps to private or public cloud services are delivering IT services in ways that can scale up and down near-instantaneously with fluctuating organisational needs.
So naturally the on-demand movement is knocking on the door of wide area network (WAN) services and asking can’t these be virtualised? Why do we have to wait weeks for a network upgrade?
Various schemes to deliver “bandwidth on demand” have been developed in the market over the past few years. The problem is that what has been put forward so far falls short of the virtualisation model. Most of these approaches are based on the concept of “over-provisioning” all network elements to cope with the maximum demand.
As an example, take an enterprise with sales volumes that are very seasonal (e.g. an online holiday business planning for a spike in last minute bookings in June) which requires a 10M Internet Access to the premises for most of the year but would like to have a 70M Internet pipe during summer. Service operators will need to design the network infrastructure for the peak demand. That includes a router at the customer premises capable of handling 70M, which costs several times more than a router capable of handling 10M. This is clearly not the on-demand model as we know it and creates a costly approach that’s charged back to the customer.
However, the new reality is that virtualisation can be used by service providers to create a service that is a big step towards the real meaning of bandwidth on-demand and gets closer to the near instant gratification model desired by enterprises.
For example, in one of our new Colt Optimum Networking service options, we’ve virtualised the on-site customer premises router, removing the physical router appliance at the customer site and delivering most of the IP functionality from a virtualised router instance, running centrally in the Colt network.
The benefits are clear – you get most of the IP functionality a router brings but without the cost of an on-site appliance and without any of the constraints to bandwidth scalability. The virtual CPE can handle 10M or 70M, so there is no need any more for an over-sized router at the customer site to cope with seasonal bandwidth peaks.
Organisations need to reshape their offerings to meet fundamental changes in their markets. On-demand service models can give IT and network functions the tools they need to respond to their business customers’ expectation for more responsive services now, not tomorrow.
I’ll be talking about the future of network functionality in upcoming posts - network function virtualisation is only the beginning of what’s possible - what do you think the future holds?
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