* PBXs, VPNs, firewalls, et al will go the way of the dinosaur
In reply to our newsletter last week titled “VoIP is not dead”, we heard from Steve Hegg with a well written and insightful reply. Hegg is an independent consultant and is currently based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. We’d like to share some of Hegg’s points and respond to his views. Hegg believes that the industry is “heading for the era of the ‘enterprise on a blade’…[that will] impact not only small, medium and large enterprises, but also the larger carriers that provide services to the home as well as the enterprise.”
Hegg expects that within five to 10 years, “discrete boxes like switches, routers, PBXs, VPNs, firewalls, etc., will go the way of the dinosaur” and that “any required services will be built upon a blade server platform as a virtual device.”
We agree – to a point. We contend that much like we continue to see key systems and rotary dial phones still working in some business offices, discrete boxes will still be in evidence for a long time.
Hegg suggests that the interface between the enterprise and carrier will evolve to the carrier providing a pipe and that the “enterprise on a blade” technology “will have the capability to provide and manage all of their services from within their server room or data center.” He concludes that “physically distributing the traffic is the only remaining task, and that effectively becomes a physical layer device, sort of like a power strip for the network.”
We agree with Hegg’s points on the disaggregation of “discrete boxes” in favor of software-based applications on common servers that largely replace features that rely on a complex set of separate network devices. However, we also believe that enterprise communications “in the cloud” is also a very real option, as is the option for IP communications and all sorts of IP-based services to remain viable in the consumer space. For example a network-based DVR (digital video recorder) is a real possibility to offer video over IP to the consumer, and network-based storage and security applications are already a reality in both the consumer and enterprise markets.
While we do think that VoIP and unified communications can both work equally well on premises equipment and within the network, the need to deliver the same VoIP and unified communications features equally well to so many devices including the in-office and home-based PC, wireless handsets, and desktop phone may be better served from a network hosted architecture.
Compared to the premise-based solution, we contend the service providers’ network operators can often better guarantee security, end-to-end management (including QoS), and applications upgrades from a Software-as-a-service (SaaS) architecture – especially for the SMB and consumers who want compatible applications delivered to wireless and wireline devices.
But in favor of Hegg’s argument for “enterprise on a blade,” we note that innovation historically occurs in premises equipment before it is “accepted” by network operators. For example, the premises-based PBX spawned Centrex voice-mail servers existed in the enterprise long before network-based voice mail was available, and traditional station-to-station voice calling features in a VoIP architecture was introduced in the enterprise years before the hosted versions were offered by carriers.In conclusion, we suggest that premise-based communications and feature servers and cloud-based services will continue to co-exist, and that enterprise users and consumers will continue to have a robust choice of servers and network-based services long after we are all retired.
