Expert Speak

Seizing The Moment: How Partners Can Capitalize On SDN

Partners

—Ryan Perera

New Delhi, Sept 9: The evolving working habits of the 21st century employee is driving IT specialists to re-evaluate their current network infrastructure. More so than ever, the enterprise is in need of a highly programmable, intelligent network infrastructure that can offer a high quality on-demand connection from virtually any geographic location.

The transformative role that Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) will have on the Indian telecom industry cannot be understated. Already SDN and NFV are beginning to disrupt the way that networks are built and operated.

As SDN becomes more ubiquitous, channels can show value in a variety of ways. First, the channel will need to show enterprises that there are various benefits in upgrading their network infrastructure. These benefits can include cost savings through operational efficiencies, increased customer satisfaction and potential new revenue streams.

Secondly, the channel can also show their capabilities in helping enterprises transition to the new infrastructure with minimal business disruption. One potential way to achieve this could be to help train the enterprise operation teams on the new infrastructure, or the channel can act in a System Integrator capability to offload the full complexity of the upgrade and manage the end-to-end migration activities. Additionally channel partners will have the ability to act not only as a System Integrator, but also as a consultant to enterprises and help to guide them in transforming their business processes.

The need for an SDN enabled WAN infrastructure is growing in the Indian market as the enterprise looks to connect its employees to the content and services they need to perform their job. The continued and more extensive enterprise use of cloud services (private, hybrid and public cloud) will begin to drive the adoption of SDN-enabled WAN connectivity. A good example of this is on-demand connectivity services. Today, an enterprise can buy cloud on-demand storage and compute services, but needs to buy a long term connectivity contract just to connect to the cloud or suffer the speed and quality limitations of the public Internet.

Hence an economic model where the enterprise can buy high performance connectivity for their IT services when they need it and pay for what they use will be very attractive. This presents an immense opportunity for channel partners to bundle a complete package of on-demand, pay-per-use IT services to the enterprise that meets all their application, compute, storage and connectivity needs at an economically compelling rate.

(The author is, Country Head, Ciena. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the views of Channel Times or any of the websites managed or operated by Trivone Digital Services)

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