Sometimes when thinking about the cloud, infrastructure gets overlooked. But migrating to cloud services doesn't absolve businesses from making sure their infrastructures not only can handle application delivery via the cloud but also that they are highly available and provide sustainable access to those services.
I got to thinking about this after attending a recent event hosted by networking and communications equipment vendor Adtran. During the conference, Adtran shared the spend metrics you see below. When you look at enterprise spending trends, you can see a thin spread among interrelated technologies.
A Wi-Fi deployment often leads to increased spending on security, for example, as companies discover that their firewalls are either lacking in the processing capacity required to support the added sessions and devices or are missing the ability to segment traffic appropriately. Even after years of talking about firewalls being incapable of handling new bandwidth, I still find many companies miss the mark on rightsizing. In some situations, such as in the hospitality vertical, deploying Wi-Fi can lead to an opportunity to garner customer data simply by capturing email addresses upon access. Similarly, hosted voice provides a tremendous amount of data to mine for customer-calling metrics such as location and time of day/week. These sorts of projects, then, can lead to increased spending on analytics software.
In another example I encountered recently, a hospitality company has discovered that the reports served up in a new SIP trunk provider's portal are invaluable -- available, searchable, and downloadable on demand. Prior to deploying the SIP trunks, the company had not used caller ID and its on-premises PBX had not produced viable reports. The new reporting capability gives insight into the company's marketing efforts and time of day, day of week, and seasonal traffic that it didn't previously have available. Now that it has discovered analytics in a small way, it understands that it can integrate more tools into its business operations through the use of cloud services.
During lunch the other day, a CFO told me that getting one software platform that "has all the options specifically for our industry is key," and that launching a cloud solution is imperative to increasing company revenue from $13 million to $20 million. Another objective was to utilize training videos to teach representatives at each location how to prepare a certain machine for usage in the field in lieu of one or two people being corporate experts. This translates to an increase in spend for storage because the company has plans to roll out videos for this and other products to instruct both employees and customers on proper equipment use and maintenance.
Interestingly, while these various spend metrics are closely related, they don't directly imply that hardware sales will be improved positively. Spending on hardware is up for grabs, as companies eye the cloud.
In answer to these trends, Adtran has turned to software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) open architectures. It is extending the capabilities of its broadband, enterprise and Wi-Fi access portfolios by supporting cloud-controlled network programmability and self-activated cloud-delivery.
SDN addresses the need for programmable and automated network environments for accelerated service creation and delivery. Subscriber applications are becoming virtual network functions, residing in the cloud or data centers versus static- function hardware devices. These cloud-based applications are activated by users from self-service Web portals, eliminating the need for truck rolls and technician support during service delivery.
The use of SDN and NFV translates to efficient and effective services delivery, said Robert Conger, Adtran's director of global carrier strategy and solutions, at the conference.
But that's not all; combined, SDN and NFV can substantially reduce hardware on customer premises -- an interesting twist for a hardware manufacturer such as Adtran. This doesn't necessarily translate to fewer hardware sales for the company, but it absolutely means a major shift in what's headed to the cloud: Wi-Fi control, firewall and security layers, analytics, storage, and mobility.
As one Adtran customer -- Tommy Whitten, a technology coordinator with Monroe County Schools in Alabama -- told me during a recent conversation, the "infrastructure" is the one thing he'd buy if money was no object. This is true not only within the education vertical but for any enterprise.
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