SMEs, he said, want cloud-based offers which are cost-effective and reduce complexity — they require less custom configuration and are happy to use a shared cloud infrastructure. “It varies at enterprise level because the type of complexity and custom integration sometimes requires a dedicated cloud infrastructure that can be controlled, upgraded and developed just for them,” said Baltazar.
Difference
Commtech’s Harvey said that from what he has seen “there is a marked difference in the technology adoption by SME and enterprise customer”, especially he said “in terms of service providers”. Service providers have learned that creating an “as a service” business is difficult, and building a network infrastructure that is scalable and resilient while managing capital and operating expenses can be a very significant challenge, according to Harvey.
Strencom’s Murphy commented that quite a number of current conversations around the network with clients of his are focusing on unified communications (UC) and collaboration solutions “especially among the mid-corporate and enterprise customers”.
“Initially when we launched our UC service, we expected a big uptake from small to medium companies with less than 100 people. The reason for this was that our service was a software-as-a-service (SaaS) delivered solution and the cost of entry was very low, especially the CapEx costs,” said Murphy.
Instead, he was surprised to find that the “real market” was enterprises between 100 and 1,000 users. “I don’t know exactly why smaller organisations don’t get it, but maybe it’s because they find it easier to collaborate and communicate by using traditional methods, because they are smaller,” Murphy said.
SDN
Looking towards the next year to 18 months, Agile’s Richardson was one of many who focused in on the “marketing buzzword” of this sector — software-defined networking (SDN). Kedington’s Sadlier agreed, saying that SDN will grow in importance as a required capability in any LAN refresh. Harvey also said the concept offers a route “to achieve network agility” at a level which is hard to ignore.
“Customers are seeking to make the network application-aware by intelligently monitoring and routing the network traffic,” said Richardson. “The potential with SDN is to make the network programmable, dynamic, and application-aware. This will be achieved through the physical separation of the data plane and control plane to provide an abstraction layer and make it easier to optimise each.”
Murphy of Strencom said SDN will enable companies to build robust networks in their cloud infrastructure, while at the same time allowing them to outsource much of the complexity to their cloud. “Amazon currently has the lion’s share of the market, with Microsoft Azure hot on their heels. Microsoft and Amazon will become the main players of commodity cloud over the coming years,” said Murphy.
In amongst the SDN fervour though there are some notes of caution, with Sadlier for one saying that he doesn’t “expect the implementation of the technology to keep pace with the hype”. It is a point with which Richardson also agrees.
“There is currently more hype than real adoption that will change over the next 18 months,” he said. “Therefore any enterprise considering a network investment should ensure they are working with a specialist who can help them navigate this significant change in how to design, build, and operate enterprise networks in the very near future,” added the Agile MD.
Key drivers
As for other trends affecting the rest of 2014 and into next year, Murphy said that one hope he has is that businesses will stop “talking about cloud as a ‘solution’ in itself, cloud is just the delivery method; it’s the application that is the real technology that delivers the business benefit”. In the next 18 months, he added, unified communications and collaboration (UCC) will “cross the chasm and become mainstream, and we will see massive growth in this area” as well.
The two key drivers during that period according to Harvey will be virtualised switches and routers “doing for routing what virtualisation did for servers”. Virtual routers, said Harvey, provide complete enterprise-class routing and security features capable of scaling from DSL to 20Gbps performance at “a fraction of the cost of proprietary solutions”.
Eircom’s Baltazar said he expects a raft of developments in the enterprise network space, and beginning with the more obvious he mentioned increased capacity, reliability, network intelligence and control as well as continued expansion in coverage of high speed data networks through fibre, 4G, Wi-Fi services.
“Hosted voice will become the default voice solutions for new companies meaning seamless access all the time via mobile, fixed or data network,” said Baltazar. “This in turn will lead to increased collaboration,” while he also sees developments happening in the network and cloud security space.
“As companies need to connect and interact with each other and access cloud services, security becomes more important, whether that’s device security, network security, data centre security or encryption,” he said.
More tech companies, Baltazar said, will launch cloud applications to enable companies to take advantage of mobility to improve or change their business process, “taking advantage of mobile data network quality improvements and quality of existing mobile devices”. UCC development will continue to improve and integrate within core companies business processes too, he said.
While for Kedington’s Sadlier, the big talking point of the next year or so in this area will be that the “rate of adoption of wireless will increase significantly”. Sadlier noted that, “it’s not always easy to successfully design and deploy wireless access layer solutions. It requires multiple skill-sets, rarely found within a single organisation.
“In addition to the normal networking skills, IP security et cetera, a wireless network will be deployed throughout the physical fabric of a building,” he added, telling potential investors that a provider “needs to have experience in providing connectivity to these distributed wireless access points as well as a comprehensive understanding of radio frequency (RF) technology. In our experience, people sometimes forget that a basic requirement for a wireless network is a robust, well planned and deployed wired one”.
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