Technology has come a long way in the world of business communications over the last decade and, along with the products and services themselves, the way we network has evolved too.
In order to find out more about what kind of impact digital transformation has had on business networking and to find out why the SDN market is set to reach $35billion by 2018, we decided to get in touch with one of the UK’s most advanced wholesale carriers, Virtual1, and see what their CTO, James Hickman, had to say about these changes.
As a starting point, one of the first things we wanted to discuss was how networking has evolved over the last decade and how much of an impact SDN has had on that marketplace as a result.
In response, along with a huge increase in demand for greater bandwidth, Hickman also informed us of the difficulties many service providers now face as a result of the huge number of vendors who have begun developing their own software management systems for the services they provide.
As a result, infrastructures are becoming increasingly flooded with a mixture of many different types of complex technologies that are notoriously difficult to manage on a traditional network alone.
However, according to Hickman, recent developments within the open source community have given us insights into ways of doing things differently and this innovation challenges these big vendors who have had to adapt their models accordingly.
“What we are seeing now is that vendors such as Cisco – who were once known predominantly as hardware developers – have begun focusing the bulk of their attention on developing software-based solutions to keep up with that open API innovation.”
In a sense, SDN offers better build and control systems, which enables service providers to very rapidly deploy services via a point and click approach that massively simplifies the process and minimises the risk of human error.
Next, we thought it would be a good idea to ask Hickman about current software leaders in the market and if there were any vendors out there that were really shining through and, if so, how SDN has enabled them to accomplish this.
“SDN makes it easier to control systems – before it was all about giving highly skilled engineers having direct access to equipment and doing lots of things using obscure commands, now it’s all about having orchestration layers on top of that and making those features available to end customers and users.”
According to Hickman, Juniper Networks are a key example of a vendor that recognised early on that the complexity of how network systems are built were going to be a major obstacle in the way of their future success.
However, Juniper instead chose to deploy through a hierarchy of services, thus making it easier to drop new elements of config in at different stages and modify the same device from multiple sources – so you can, for example, have lots of engineers working on the same router without being locked out of the device.
“In comparison to Cisco, where it is very easy to lock yourself out of a device when writing config, Juniper enables developers to create a candidate, commit the config later on and roll back if they need to. As a result, they end up having much more flexibility with regards to how they approach the config and it makes it much easier to do automation because they can simply talk to the relevant piece of config they want to change.”
As we can see, these new standards that have evolved through the open APIs are drastically changing the way things are done and traditional ports and interfaces are very much dying out as a result. Instead, modern networks now require a single point controlling system that can talk to lots of different vendors devices, and this has always been the aim of software defined networking movement.
Given that Virtual1 resell their networking through channel partners, we asked Hickman what effect this change would have on them, whether or not they would have to re-learn technologies and what Virtual1 as a company have done to address that issue.
Interestingly enough, Hickman told us that the change actually simplifies, rather than complicates the process and through their 1Portal that are now able to expose some of the SDN capabilities of the core network to their partners in a non-complex way.
By way of example, Hickman explains the Virtual1 change request process:
“Whereas a change request was previously done through email based correspondence – a method of communication that was inefficient and difficult to get the message across clearly first time – with SDN, Virtual1 are able to give the customer a simple online form to fill in that allows them to choose exactly what kind of config they want and which devices they want to apply it to and straight away that config is applied”
In summary, we can see how SDN enables businesses to make powerful changes to their network without having to have a degree level training and more can be done to improve customer service and meet the fluctuating demands of modern applications without the hassle.
However, though we can clearly see how SDN adds more value to a proposition by automating processes and cutting out a lot of the labour and add-ons a service providers would normally be responsible for providing, we wanted to know if there are any new opportunities for channel partners to add that value back in to their customer base?
In response to this, Hickman informed us that, although many of the traditional interfaces and ports are now redundant as networks are moving towards more centralised control points, end users must still ensure that all of their hardware and backend data sets are SDN compliant and channel partners have the perfect opportunity to help them achieve this.
Moreover, with the automation capabilities SDN offers, channel partners can deliver their services much more efficiently and drive down cost as a result. Meanwhile, as the software defined network handles the bulk of the work autonomously, engineers are free to focus their skills on more complex issues to ensure the customer can receive their full attention.
Finally, after asking Hickman what he thought about the future the SDN marketplace and what challenges he thinks Virtual1 will face over the next 12 months, he informed us that he is hoping their carriers and suppliers will provide more APIs for their services so they can use SDN to its full potential.
Though there has been some movement on this, there are still limitations that come from relying on a tiered service from a carrier and he hopes these challenges will be overcome in the year ahead.
Likewise, as well as helping their suppliers achieve this goal, Virtual1 are also working to expose all of these SDN API capabilities to their partners so if they want to develop their own portals and systems as part of a wider offering to their customer base they can.
SDN Series
Over the next few months we will be running our biweekly Virtual1 sponsored SDN Series where readers can learn about what Software Defined Networking is, why it is currently experiencing huge growth and how it can help improve business communications on a number of different levels.
In our next article we will be taking a deeper dive into the benefits SDN and discussing, again with Virtual1 CTO, James Hickman, how Software Defined Networking is changing the way service providers deliver connectivity products to their customers.
