WAN Governance

BEYOND MPLS (3/3) - WAN Governance aligns customers’ networks with their business priorities

Powered by Autonomic Networking, WAN Governance provides Managed Service Providers with cloud-ready networks. It delivers embedded value-added services that:

• Fully control and optimize performance, including MPLS, private and public cloud.
• Guarantee critical business applications for application-centric SLAs.
• Unify application availability and performance across cloud networks.
• Dynamically adapt to whatever is happening on the network.

Networks are managed deterministically, automatically adapting to demand changes and aligning application performance with business needs:

• Centralized application performance objectives provides a simple and high-level mean for the IT managers to define their IT and business priorities.
• Automated "sense-and-respond" architecture adapts to any traffic situation and network topology with intelligent control and optimization of application sessions.
• Collaborative agents enabling full traffic management control with physical hardware deployment in only 10-20% of a customer's locations.
• Scalability up to 10M's users, 100K's sites and 10K's networks to support any service provider.

Beyond MPLS: Autonomic Networking embedded in your VPN enables unique selling opportunities

• Application Visibility gives full transparency of application traffic topology and performance; it differentiate network and IT problems. Reporting provides from C-level KPIs to technical information.
• Control and Quality of Service allocates bandwidth across end-user sessions to sustain application performance objectives according to application-centric SLAs. It automatically control some-to-many and any-to-any traffic mesh, and cloud-based applications delivery from private or hosted datacenters.
• WAN Optimization accelerates application response times and reduces bandwidth requirements with the latest optimization techniques, such as byte caching, CIFS acceleration, TCP acceleration, etc.
• Dynamic WAN Selection automatically selects the best customer network (MPLS, Internet and Ethernet) for each new communication according to availability, load and performance.

Deliver and enforce application-centric SLAs

Autonomic Networking enables to move from network SLAs to application SLAs. It automatically prioritizes and accelerates applications, preventing non-critical applications from penalizing business-critical applications and ensuring SLAs are always enforced.

Manage hybrid MPLS, Internet and Ethernet networks as one network

Autonomic Networking manages customers' hybrid combinations of MPLS, Internet and Ethernet networks as one seamless network. It supports enterprise customers' needs to transition to cloud computing at their own pace and saves substantial time and resources.

Scalable Application-Level Architecture manages thousands of enterprise customers

The SALSA platform supports multi-tenant management application-centric VPN services for thousands of enterprise customers from a single, unified operations center. SALSA seamlessly integrates within any service provider's existing OSS/BSS environment.

(You can find a more detailed version of this text in the free "BEYOND MPLS - Enabling a new business vision for network service providers Cloud-ready networks" white paper)

BEYOND MPLS (2/3) - From connectivity provider to business partner

(…) The success of service providers' changing business models will depend on capabilities to help solve an enterprise IT department's broader challenges. Enterprise customers have basic connectivity and IP foundations. What they don't have and desperately need are capabilities to better implement and manage applications over networks for optimal business advantage, such as with provisioning, scalability, and dynamically controlling WAN traffic in accordance with IT governance.

VPN transformation to a cloud-ready network with "business-aware" IT services on top of MPLS expands the relationship between service providers and enterprise IT departments. Cloud-ready network services add business value for enterprises transitioning to cloud computing and transform perceptions of the service provider from costly "connectivity supplier" to true business partner and trusted advisor for achieving customers' productivity and performance goals. With the network as the application delivery platform, providers can create a clear differentiation in the IT services market from traditional integrators and outsourcers, such as IBM Global Services, HP and CSC.

Enterprise customers' main barriers to adoption of cloud computing

In a 2010 survey conducted by market research firm Ovum, 150 large enterprises in the US and Europe rated the main barriers to enterprise adoption of cloud computing (in order of importance) as data governance, security, use of the public Internet, loss of enterprise control, SLAs and lack of standards.

With VPN transformation beyond MPLS to cloud-ready network services, providers can play a major role in enabling customers to overcome these barriers.

Must-have features for cloud-ready networks

Looking at the WAN, a cloud-ready network with embedded business-aware VPN services must offer features that help solve an enterprise IT department's broader challenges. Typical challenges include:

• Unifying VPN technologies (MPLS, Ethernet and Internet) into a single, coherent network with consolidated, centralized, application management and control (hybrid network unification).
• Provisioning network accesses according to business-critical application requirements (accurate network sizing and application prioritization).
• Guaranteeing the availability and performance of business-critical applications regardless of MPLS or cloud delivery (expanding the scope of network CoS SLAs to more granular "application-centric" QoS SLAs).
• Ensuring cloud security, especially for public cloud services.
• Measuring application performance with quality metrics to improve operational visibility and the "WAN Governance" component of IT Governance.
• Automatic provisioning of new applications, network sites and additional end users.
• Ensuring the same levels of service for mobile users requiring anywhere, anytime access.

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BEYOND MPLS (1/3) - Enabling a new business vision for network service providers

We publish now a series of 3 posts from Jean-François Rousseau, in charge of Service Providers Business Development at Ipanema Technologies, who talks about his new vision of network services.

Business challenges force enterprises in every industry to adopt technology innovations that reduce costs, streamline processes and improve their business agility. Examples include desktop virtualization, unified communications, web-accessible business applications, video streaming, telepresence and hybrid networks. Cloud computing is yet another era of transformational IT improvements that will span over a decade. All of these technology innovations increase the value of the WAN as a strategic asset for productivity and enterprise performance. They also increase WAN complexity and introduce new performance challenges:

• Cloud computing increases traffic mix, complexity and needs for security, control and governance.
• Unified communications and other collaborative applications introduce new time-sensitive and distributed communications over the WAN.
• Hybrid networks introduce new issues surrounding IT strategy and application performance consistency.

Within the overall IT value chain, enterprises now have much greater needs for WAN performance that is predictable, optimized and controlled in real time. This represents a tremendous opportunity for service providers to go beyond basic transport services.

The network as a cloud-ready application delivery platform

A "cloud-ready network" means a WAN that is able to understand, control and optimize traffic between branch offices and public and private data centers. Ideally, a cloud-ready network can automatically adapt to new traffic schemes where a same branch talks to several data centers and can guarantee the performance of each flow. Another important characteristic is the ability to link the cloud datacenter OSS to the cloud-ready network OSS and achieve a seamless end-to-end orchestration through elastic provisioning.

Network service providers can take pole position in the cloud computing market

It's the service providers who command the most strategic position within any network-based applications delivery architecture, including MPLS VPN, internal or third-party private cloud, or public cloud. Without a network, there is no applications delivery service. To retain and expand business with existing enterprise customers, and attract new accounts, providers need to adapt business models by transforming VPNs beyond MPLS with cloud services.

Declining MPLS revenue provides incentive for transformation to cloud-ready networks

At WAN contract renewal, incumbent providers are asked to provide more bandwidth and more services while their enterprise customers demand to pay less. On average, incumbent providers in Western Europe have experienced a 20% decrease in MPLS VPN revenue in the face of strong competition and high churn rates as challengers compete on price. Beyond MPLS, competitive advantage and best revenue opportunities will shift to VPN transformation and the higher value of cloud-ready network services.

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