Channel Live 2019 EVENTS
“The opportunities are massive, the transitions to these digitized workplaces are underway
and people are not slowing down. But they are not getting the rewards yet because we are not
solving the right business problems.” Craig Decker, Managing Director of EMEAR - Cisco
Ant Molloy, CEO of Aurora, and Terry O’Brien, CEO of DWS, joined David
Dungay and Paul Richens to talk about Aurora’s new software developments
not easy, is only one part of the
puzzle. e second part is all
about adoption.
Miller continued,
“Fundamentally it’s the people
moving from these copper
services onto the full bre
services which are going to
prove whether this is the right
thing to do or not. Really
interestingly it will prove the
business cases of those people
building. You will hear loads
of press activity around the
latest greatest network provider
that has secured hundreds of
millions from some pension
fund or infrastructure fund
but actually they are all
intrinsically tied to hitting
their targets. ese targets are
about building but also about
adoption. When we look at
adoption we have to look at who
is actually providing that end
connection to the customer.
In the consumer space you
will know about all the big
household names. In business,
where the prot is made with
FULL-FIBRE - MARKET COOPERATION NEEDED
During his interview Guy Miller hinted there might be some big industry
collaboration currently underway to ensure the Channel can access different
access providers in the same place. He did warn that if the industry doesn’t
get this right it will leave partners frustrated and not able to sell the best
connectivity available to their customers. Take a look on the Comms Business
website for the whole interview.
Exhibitor Interview – Neil Wilson, Head of Products and
Marketing at Virtua1
Comms Business Magazine (CBM): What is your assessment of
the SD-WAN market right now?
Neil Wilson (NW): If you sat six people down and asked them what SD-WAN is
they would probably give you six different answers. Gartners work shows there is
not a defined ‘this is what SD-WAN looks like’. There are a number of different things
which can make up an SD-WAN solution. That might be security features, real time
monitoring or the movement of data. There is some really exciting stuff and you can
see some incredibly impressive demonstrations from some of the main hardware
vendors like links dropping and traffic automatically being re-routed or traffic flow
degrading and links automatically being re-routed. However, I don’t think its very
easy to line up all the SD-WAN vendors and say ‘these are apples for apples’ – I don’t
believe they are. They all come from different points in the market.
CMB: who is driving SD-WAN adoption?
NW: It’s very much end-customer driven. If you asked most of the networking
vendors here if they want to be selling SD-WAN they would say MPLS is still perfectly
fit for purpose. You’ve got a private network, it can be controlled and prioritised but
what it all boils down to for me is customer experience and service. That is where
our industry has let end user businesses down. I think there could have been a point
where SD-WAN as an entity wouldn’t have needed to exist if the industry had moved
faster, made their networks more dynamic, and made them more interactive. Would
SD-WAN have been necessary?
CBM: What are Virtual1 doing at the show?
NW: We expanded our network out nationwide just over two years ago, that’s
been really successful so we are now
broadening out that portfolio as we
already have the infrastructure in
place. We are looking to bring a low
cost fibre to the cabinet proposition
to the market which means we can
appeal to a broader cross section of
businesses and start looking at the
wrap around things that businesses
tend to have like home workers and
smaller discrete sites. This is in
addition to the larger connectivity
areas which we are well known for.
The other thing we are bringing to
market is our SD-WAN proposition to
sit alongside our software defined
network.
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www.commsbusiness.co.uk October 2019 | Comms Business Magazine | 15
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