In its recent SPIT Manifesto, Ray LeMaistre, International Managing Editor of Light Reading, covers a lot of ground on the impact of telecom industry changes on Service Provider Information Technology (SPIT). LeMaistre points out how a service provider's IT department plays a much more critical role in achieving business objectives—such as:
• Developing and monetizing new services/applications
• Cutting costs
• Migrating to next-generation networks
• Improving customer care/experience
I believe Ray gets a fundamental trend: it is not more – at least not only – networking that will make the difference for added-value service: Telco's IT will be at the core of them. This is not that surprising if we understand that such added-value services address application delivery, i.e. the enterprise's IT department, not only its network team: its IT talking to IT, after all.
WAN Governance is exactly about this: aligning the network contribution to the enterprise's IT requirements. It is thus as an excellent federating concept for innovative managed services that providers can offer to increase their business value to enterprise customers—and their revenue. It gathers all the other types of application-centric VPN services, including Application Performance Management, QoS & Control, WAN Optimization and Hybrid Network Unification under a common umbrella.
Through WAN Governance, a service provider can help an enterprise customer align network requirements with business needs, ensure network rightsizing, and keep the network aligned for optimal applications performance with C-level WAN Governance dashboards. It is the type of managed service that enables enterprise IT departments to show greater business value to senior management, stretch IT budgets, and increase their loyalty and interest in other services from the provider.
Autonomic Networking coupled to a truly integrated multi-tenant platform reduces time to market with application-centric VPN services, and will offer huge advantages for any service provider still planning, evaluating or trying to implement their own "SPIT Manifesto." For example, global and domestic telcos such as Belgacom, BT, C&W, OBS, Reliance, Swisscom, Tata, Telecom Italia and many more already offer their own flavor of "application-centric" VPN managed services embracing WAN Governance, using the integrated SALSA multi-tenant management platform powered by Autonomic Networking.
Says LeMaistre, "Whether selling to consumers, enterprises, governments, other service providers, content owners, or applications developers, the SPIT systems underpinning a service provider's business strategy has never been more critical. The decisions that service providers make about their SPIT strategies could unleash unprecedented value for service providers, but, if handled poorly, it could put them years behind their competitors."
You can learn more about WAN Governance here and of course here (a bit self-referencing…), and moving beyond MPLS and into a variety of application-centric VPN services here.
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