Every now and then it’s worthwhile to take a step back, assess big-picture trends and evaluate how they might benefit you. Case in point: the sea change underway in WAN technologies.
Six or seven years ago, there were two major trends: fast-maturing data technologies (specifically, frame relay and ATM) coupled with rapid year-over-year price decreases because of deregulation, competition and the explosive growth in telecom infrastructure. The combination meant that IT executives aggressively could play service providers against each other to wring real bargains out of the telephone companies for mature, reliable WAN services.
What are the comparable trends today, and how should IT executives capitalize on them?
Regarding the telecom industry as a whole, one big trend is stabilization. By and large, service providers have staunched the hemorrhage of red ink. Traditional telcos have weathered the storm and slowly are beginning to make new capital, infrastructure and operations investments. A handful of emerging service providers has made it to the brink of profitability and is looking toward expansion.
The upshot is that IT executives can scale back (although not eliminate) concerns that telcos might go belly up. More to the point, the days of rapid price decreases for mature technologies are over – prices aren’t going back up, but the days of 20% year-over-year decreases are long gone.
More importantly, though, new technologies quietly are reshaping the face of the corporate network. IT executives should explore some of the technologies below to see how they can improve productivity, reduce costs and enable new ways of doing business.
Convergence. Yes, the term is so yesterday. But it’s really happening – particularly the convergence of voice, wireless and mobile multifunctional devices. IT executives consistently tell me that the reason they’re deploying technologies such as IP telephony and Wi-Fi is to achieve the long-sought dream of anytime, anywhere, voice and data connectivity. We’ve come a long way since IP telephony was pitched as a way to reduce WAN costs. These days, it’s a way to make organizations faster and more productive.
Policy-based remote and extranet access. The perimeter really is going away, folks. Which means IT executives seeking remote-access services – where remote is defined as not on the hardwired corporate LAN – should consider a range of emerging policy-based services from providers such as AT&T, Fiberlink, MegaPath Networks (which just bought T-Manage) and others (Frank Dzubeck has more to say on this topic).
Slow emergence of non-infrastructure-based services. A handful of aggregators are seriously beginning to change the way services are delivered. Aggregators can deliver end-to-end solutions with appropriate service-level agreements (SLA), billing and management – perfect when you need to go places traditional telcos can’t reach.
The maturing of IP VPNs. IP VPNs are beginning to step up to the task of providing high-quality, SLA-managed, low-cost connectivity in a host of ways: site-to-site inside corporate networks, company-to-company, and as part of the remote and extranet services described above. Watch for emerging specs such as Secure Sockets Layer and others to compete with tried-and-true solutions such as IP Security and Multi-Protocol Label Switching.
Johnson is president and chief research officer at Nemertes Research, an independent technology research firm. She can be reached at johna@nemertes.com.
