* Providers such as SmartPipes take fresh approach to setting up WAN bandwidth
For those charged with managing an enterprise’s networked infrastructure, there is a word that can cause cold sweats and ulcers: bandwidth. This has nothing to do with network engineering or determining bandwidth requirements. It has everything to do with acquiring and implementing the bandwidth.
Sometimes it appears carriers set out to make setting up connections as complex as they can. Their motivation seems to be that if it is virtually impossible to figure out the process for acquiring a connection or swapping one, then it is unlikely that a customer would change carriers. It is no wonder that, by some estimates, the average enterprise is paying for 20% more connectivity than it actually uses. Enterprises generally just don’t know that they have the circuits.
The unfortunate thing is that enterprise IT organizations really don’t have the resources anymore to backstop the carriers by ensuring that circuits are built and provisioned properly. The undocumented overhead associated with acquiring and tracking circuits actually makes IT less efficient and increases operational expenses. IT has been known to devote huge amounts of resources to inventory and contract control for connectivity. As IT is squeezed to reduce costs, it is harder to justify the people, time and expense devoted to managing bandwidth. Yet the costs associated with not doing so can be orders of magnitude more.
In response to this paradigm lock, there is arising a new breed of carrier that in a sense is a virtual carrier. The new service providers capitalize on the inefficiencies of traditional carriers by insulating enterprise IT organizations from the complexities of carrier provisioning and pricing processes. The IT organization merely orders a circuit, and the non-traditional service provider delivers one. The underlying circuit may be a physical link that runs through carrier networks, or it can be a virtual circuit patched together using VPN technology and running over the Internet. As far as the customer is concerned it is just a circuit without all of the headaches.
The beauty of non-traditional service providers is that, when circuits are delivered using VPN technology, some nifty value-added services can be built in. These include such perks as bandwidth-throttling to reduce costs, inventory control and single billing for complex circuits that traverse multiple networks.
One company spearheading the movement is SmartPipes. Unlike some other new companies in this area, SmartPipes started with management applications that simplified the deployment and management of VPN connections. While the acceptance of this technology was increasingly positive, SmartPipes found that rather than simplifying the construction of a circuit, many of its clients preferred to avoid the complexity entirely.
SmartPipes, then, became a service provider through circumstances and was able to use its own applications, bundled with other service capabilities in a service, to optimize the delivery of a managed connection to end users.
It is reasonable to expect that SmartPipes’ experience will not be unique among vendors that have set out to reduce operational complexity for enterprise IT. Complexity equals cost. With IT discovering that reducing complexity can be a good way to reduce the cost of doing business, Enterprise Management Associates expects that provisioning bandwidth in this way will be an increasingly popular way for IT to control the cost of network infrastructure.
