* Watch out for apps-aware hybrid and managed services
What are the biggest trends and challenges that will face corporate network managers in 2007 when it comes to purchasing Internet services? I asked two experts – DNS inventor and Nominum Chairman Paul Mockapetris and Savvis CTO Bryan Doerr – and here is what they had to say.
Q. What are the top trends for 2007?
A. Both Mockapetris and Doerr predict the availability of new and better services from carriers in 2007.
Mockapetris says service providers are more focused on the quality of the services they provide, particularly when it comes to the performance of applications over the Internet.
“We see carriers more focused on making sure that applications work, rather than providing raw bandwidth,” Mockapetris says. He predicts quality will improve for both broadband and wireless services, and he says customers will pay more for higher quality DSL, cable and WiMAX services.
Doerr predicts the release of new application-aware hybrid and managed services.
“The network is getting intelligent again,” Doerr says. “The network is becoming embedded in terms of application awareness. Service providers can monitor what is happening in the network and adjust it to obtain end-to-end application performance instead of having the user’s quality of service dictated by the available bandwidth.”
Mockapetris says innovation will come in small packages in 2007.
“Little services are the trend for 2007, like mashups that put information on a map,” he says. “These are little things that tie all of the technology together, but they will have big significance for end users.”
Q. What are the biggest worries about the state of the Internet infrastructure?
A: For Doerr, the biggest worry is the glut of network capacity and its continued impact on the health of the service provider marketplace.
“If [network capacity] doesn’t embed more intelligence, it can be perceived as a commodity,” Doerr says. “Service providers are still under pressure to provide more capacity at ever-shrinking prices.”
That’s why Doerr says managed service providers will be stronger and financially healthier in 2007.
“With managed services, commodity pricing is less of a concern because you are managing the edge of the network and controlling the complexity of the network for the customer,” Doerr says.
Of particular concern to Doerr are metro Ethernet services that provide huge amounts of bandwidth to corporate customers. He says these services will continue to drive the value of IP services down in 2007.
Meanwhile, Mockapetris says network managers need better tools for managing their increasingly complex wired and wireless networks. This trend will accelerate with the release of Microsoft’s new Vista operating system, which allows end users to do more ad hoc networking.
“The number of devices that are going to be connected to the network is increasing, and managing all of that is going to be a challenge,” Mockapetris says. “How many times have you run into a corporate network manager who says some guy has gone down to the Costco and bought a wireless access point and plugged it in? Managing all of this stuff in the face of users who are tinkering more and more with the infrastructure is a big worry.”
Q. What emerging Internet technologies are you most excited about?
A. Mockapetris is excited about the prospect of tackling spam with new tools for managing his e-mail inbox.
“People are going to start to put together these identity tools so they can sort their e-mail inboxes based on who the message is coming from,” Mockapetris says. “I don’t think there is any hope in looking at a message and deciding if it is spam or not, but I do think I can classify who the mail is from and prioritize it at the top of my mailbox.”
Mockapetris also says IPv6 will continue to evolve in 2007.
“People will have to use IPv6 because we are running out of IPv4 address space,” he says. “That’s going to come along.”
Not surprisingly, Doerr is excited about the emergence of virtualized services like those that Savvis has pioneered. He says service providers like Savvis will launch new services to replace appliances such as firewalls and intrusion detection systems.
“These services are making the network more intelligent and raising the role of the network in the architecture and providing new ways of doing things in application development,” Doerr says.
Doerr says service providers will embed more policy-based controls in their dashboards to make it easier for customers to dial up bandwidth or quality of service to improve application performance.
“Our challenge is to take the IP infrastructure policy and apply it to the management of bandwidth and the management of services and show that in our portal,” he says. “We will be able to respond to occurrences in the network such as end-point failure or congestion that affect a critical application and those occurrences will become trigger points for previously expressed policies.”
Doerr adds that “the really cool thing here is that when service providers do this right, their service is going to be much richer, much better than what the enterprise may be able to do for themselves.”
Q. What is the one new service that corporate network managers should buy in 2007?
A. Savvis, of course, says corporate network managers should buy more managed services in 2007.
“They need to ask themselves why they should be running these routers themselves,” Doerr says. “I would really hope that the enterprise would take a look at service providers again not just for Internet connectivity but for all of their private networking needs.”
Mockapetris says corporate network managers should take another look at voice peering points.
“Eventually, users are going to be getting voice services almost for free,” he says. “But now that we’ve figured out how to do it cheap, we need to figure out how to have a quality service. We don’t want cell phone quality voice services to be ubiquitous.”
