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Vertical Convergence

Managing the interaction of the application and the network—across the course of the ever-evolving lifespans of both—will become an increasingly important issue for communications professionals.

One of the effects of communication's migration to a software model is that applications become more important. As communications becomes less focused on running as a silo-ed system based on a hardware-heavy PBX, communications instead becomes a feature or function of any number of applications running on the network. (See the recent No Jitter post from industry expert Marty Parker for discussion of how this trend is likely to evolve in 2015.)

This means that applications' interaction with the network infrastructure becomes an increasingly important part of the communications professional's job. For several years now, the broader IT industry has used the term DevOps to characterize the process of developing, testing, and running applications in concert with network management, so as to ensure that the apps actually run as expected by their developers (and users). You hear various critiques of the term DevOps, and I have no idea whether communications will develop a DevOps focus (or if DevOps will develop a communications focus), but I do believe that managing the interaction of the application and the network--across the course of the ever-evolving lifespans of both--will become an increasingly important issue for communications professionals.

That's why I was grateful to see Terry Slattery's latest No Jitter post. Terry, of course, is the industry's best expert on network performance for real-time apps, and his recent post contains a lot of forward-thinking ideas that I believe are going to become increasingly important in enterprise communications.

Terry focuses on application optimization in Software Defined Networks (SDNs), and admittedly SDN is still a futures technology for many enterprises. But the principles that guide his discussion are rooted in issues with which network managers and communications professionals already are grappling.

The key issue is that network topologies have been evolving at ever-faster rates; server virtualization has sped up this issue and expanded it to the application realm, and when SDNs, or at least SDN principles, begin moving into the network, topology evolution will be almost non-stop. These changes will interact with the dynamic processes of application development, in some cases distorting that process. That's been a DevOps challenge from the start, but of course the stakes get higher when your applications now have to deliver real-time performance because they contain a communications element.

Terry predicts: "Troubleshooting applications that have significant changes in performance is going to be the realm of the cross-functional experts. These will be the staff members who understand compute, storage, networking, and virtualization of each. I forecast that many IT teams won't understand enough about their applications and the virtual infrastructure to identify the root cause of many problems."

That's where communications folks need to play a role. They'll need to be part of these cross-functional teams, and the better they understand the applications--especially the apps' use of communications features and functions--the more valuable they'll be to the business that relies on these communications-enabled applications.

There are lots of new aspects to this vertical convergence of communications, applications, and the network infrastructure--now and even more so as the infrastructure gets virtualized. For example, since elements of the infrastructure may be based on services running in the public cloud, you'll need to ride herd on those service providers, as well as on the service providers from whom you buy the bandwidth to connect to the cloud-based services.

We're going to be all over these emerging issues at Enterprise Connect Orlando the week of March 16. Terry's going to be running a 3-hour workshop on Preparing Your Infrastructure for UC, together with our old friend John Bartlett, a leading authority on real-time performance. He'll also be leading a session on Tools and Trends for Troubleshooting UC Performance. These sessions will focus heavily on today's challenges, but you'll also get a glimpse of where the new issues are likely to emerge.

We've also got a new General Session on the keynote stage that I'm really looking forward to. It's called EC Summit: Life in a Cloud-Based, Software-Intensive Future, and I'll be moderating it together with industry analyst Zeus Kerravala, another No Jitter blogger. We'll discuss the ways in which software development, particularly when hosted in the cloud, will impact the future of enterprise communications.

I'd love to see you in Orlando this March for Enterprise Connect.