Avaya Networking

What significant changes did the networking sector witness in 2013? What did these changes mean to vendors and customers?

2013 was the year that software-defined networking – at least as a concept – went ‘mainstream’.  I believe that we’ve seen some interesting announcements, but it’s still an emerging concept that can go in a number of different directions.There is a hardware centric camp and a software centric (overlay) camp that has emerged and it’s not yet clear as to whether the market will adopt one or the other or if a hybrid approach is the one that will ultimately win out.

Another objective of SDN is to eliminate reliance on lock-in technologies; hence, the growing interest in open source technologies / forums such as the Open Compute Project, Open Flow, Open Daylight and OpenStack.  We believe that open source initiatives– which achieved a huge amount of momentum in 2013 - will continue to have traction and have the potential to create a major shift in our industry.

Although SDN is certainly the biggest trend to hit networking, you can’t ignore Cloud or the impact the Cloud is having on IT.  Many companies leverage Software-as-a-Service today, and are in various stages of deploying private cloud environments.  BYOD is also driving the BYOA phenomenon – where users are finding their own corporate applications to be more productive in their jobs.   As this has implications on security and regulatory compliance – it is driving IT to look more and more towards public cloud offers to meet the demands of their users.  The end result will be an increase in hybrid cloud deployments where some critical applications will remain on premise and others will be purchased through a cloud provider.

Other trends that cannot be ignored are increased mobility of the workforce, an increased need for video and conferencing solutions, Big Data and Social Media.  These are all things that are impacting the way we build and design networks. 

What are some of the changes you had anticipated would happen in 2013, but did not happen?

I think we all saw the SDN tsunami coming, certainly in terms of vendor activity, and it was simply a case of when it would strike, how big a splash it would make, and what sort of impact it would have.  It’s interesting that with all the marketing efforts from vendors, analysts and different consortiums the reality is that many enterprises are confused on what exactly SDN really is.  It is clear that it is an initiative that has the potential to create a massive shift in our industry and we here at Avaya have brought to market some very exciting initiatives for SDN; however, it is still very much in the early days and there is still some education that must be done by the industry as a whole to bring customers from the interest to evaluation and deployment phases.

Another trend that we actually anticipated was the consolidation around merchant silicon, transitioning away from proprietary ASICs.  The most obvious market segment for this is the Data Center Top-of-Rack Switch; we’re seeing very similar products, with very similar port densities, performance claims, and designs from virtually every vendor.  We’re excited to be taking a very different route with our use of merchant silicon, leveraging the pluses of a commodity technology but adding significant value through some truly unique design innovation.  Our designs can reduce costs, reduce complexity and increase performance by eliminating full Tiers within the Data Center networks.

A somewhat surprising trend is still the relatively low uptake in public cloud based services.  We still believe that this will shift as these services mature and enterprises start testing the waters with outsourcing through co-location and managed service offers.  Another example could be Fiber Channel over Ethernet which has been talked about for years but has failed to see mass deployment.

Can you paint us the picture of how landscape for networking sector will change in 2014? What are some of the broader trends you are closely watching?

We believe that SDN will move more from the “interest” phase into the “evaluation” phase and the solutions that will be delivered to market will evolve and become more sophisticated.  We expect a focus on agility and automation –while offering true integration with the applications that it needs to support.  It will also evolve from being primarily a Data Center technology to a technology that extends into the campus and the remote branches – delivering one dynamic network end to end.

We also expect for even broader market adoption of network virtualization as a stepping stone towards SDN based solutions.  We are experiencing tremendous growth of our Fabric Connect technology (based on enhanced Shortest Path Bridging).  It is unique in the industry in its inherent support for multi-service, multi-location and multi-tenancy - with a laser focus on agility and simplicity.  It streamlines the number of protocols required in the network, eliminates complex and error prone hop by hop provisioning practices and enables new services and changes to service to be enacted at the edge of the network only.  It is a technology that is SDN-ready, and it allows businesses to be both tactical and strategic, delivering much of the promise of SDN but doing so now, today, while also being foundation for the future.

Cloud will continue to be an important trend as IT looksdifferent options for delivering applications to their end users.  Gartner refers to IT evolving more into a service broker role where they ultimately manage the relationships between their end users and different cloud service providers. 

Big Data, Social Media, BYOD/ BYOA, Mobility, Video, Regulatory Compliance, Open Source Technologies and the increasing need to secure and protect data are other major trends that will continue in 2014.

Can you highlight how the customer spends in this sector will change in 2014? What makes you think customers will be buying more/less?

We believe that like previous years, IT budgets will remain relatively flat to declining.  Furthermore, one of the challenges faced by many CIO’s is that the majority of that budget (many analysts estimate up to 80%) is allocated to just keeping the lights on.  Unfortunately very little of the budget is directed towards innovation. 

What we expect, is that customers will look at solutions that will simplify their operational environment to allow them to reduce the amount of money that it takes for them to just keep the lights on.  If they can reduce their ongoing operating expenses - that will allow them to free up budget to spend on innovation. 

This is why Avaya is focusing on delivering solutions, like our Fabric Connect technology (based on enhanced Shortest Path Bridging) and our Software-Defined Data Center Framework that reduce ongoing OPEX spend.  Our Fabric technology eliminates the need to schedule costly maintenance windows for moves, adds and changes and keeps the network simple and streamlined so that it’s easier to configure and troubleshoot.  This allows network operators to reduce costs and re-direct some of that money towards innovation.

Our Software Defined Data Center framework is about breaking down traditional Data Center silo’s and enabling coordinated resource allocation between compute, storage, networking and appliances through the use of OpenStack.  This enables our customers to turn up cloud based services in minutes in just a few simple steps – in a completely coordinated manner.  Again, another example of a time and cost savings initiative for our customers.

What's in store for your company in 2014?

Avaya is going through a major shift internally and you are going to continue to see us evolve more and more towards being a software and services oriented company- really focused on solutions.  We started on this path a couple of years ago with the virtualization of many of our real-time applications and our push towards SDN and SDDC.  We also have been aggressively moving into cloud and providing our partners the ability to deliver Communications and Infrastructure-as-a-Serviceto customers who are looking more towards OPEX-based solutions as opposed to CAPEX.  Additionally, one of our fastest growing business units is our AOS division which offers private hosted cloud services for a variety of end customers with very flexible options for management and deployment – better allowing our customers to focus on their core competencies.

You are also going to see us focusing on selling the value of Avaya’s full stack.  We are one of the only vendors who can offer a complete solution that ranges from networking all the way through to the applications.  You will see us create closer ties and integration between our applications and network.  We want the network to be able to respond dynamically to the requirements of the application to ensure a high quality of experience for our end users.  This is a key component of how we are evolving our SDN framework moving forward into 2014.

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