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FEATURE NETWORKING
such as most datacentre SDN products,
best networking products and
partners can handle the unfamiliar
integrate and bundle a disaggregated
software operations or completely build
and virtualised networking solution.
and operate it as a managed service.
Ongoing support of such softwaredefined
Partners can also assist with the hypercontextual
solutions can be an additional
NetOps workflows and
recurring revenue stream for the
getting them automated,” says James
partners,” says Bhalgat.
Kelly, director, enterprise marketing at
Partners should also identify
Juniper Networks.
areas where automation is required
While cloud service providers
urgently. “Smart buildings, smart
(CSPs) and web-scale companies
cities, transportation, healthcare and
have deployed SDN and NFV widely
any distributed network is a prime
to achieve huge scale of economies,
candidate for these types of network
enterprise customers do not have the
improvements,” says Chris Elliott,
means to deploy them and need help
country manager UKI at Allied Telesis
to realise the same level of efficiencies,
International.
says Ash Bhalgat, senior director of
“The more critical the network
cloud marketing at Mellanox, which was
performance and the more difficult the
recently acquired by Nvidia.
infrastructure is to manage, the more
“Instead of purely reselling a product
likely this is to be needed.”
from a vendor, partners can now add
However, he also notes that there
tremendous value to a customer’s IT
are “many customers still wary of SDN
infrastructure by integrating a variety
and the perceived risks involved”,
of different vendor products to create
so he advises “partnering with a
agile, flexible and innovative solutions,”
vendor that can provide automation
he tells TBT.
within a more traditional technology
“There are a number of opportunities
framework while fully supporting
for partners to choose the best-ofthe
SDN in its portfolio via things like
14 www.technologybusinesstoday.com April 2019 OpenFlow will be key to ensuring
partners and customers are best placed
to benefit from these technologies at the
right time for them.”
WHAT’S NEXT FOR THE VENDORS?
According to Juniper’s Kelly, fullymanaged
SDN systems as a service are
appearing first in the SD-WAN and Wi-
Fi space. Juniper recently announced
plans to acquire born-in the-cloud
SDN firm Mist, expanding the vendor’s
presence in the cloud-managed
segment of the wireless networking
market. It also claims the deal enables
it to “extend cloud-based management
and end-to-end AI-driven visibility (‘AI
for IT’) across the end-to-end enterprise
network”.
“While in the SD-WAN space, Juniper
believes that a self-managed (onprem
or in cloud) deployed option is
important for SD-WAN, particularly for
service providers that want full control
and customisation of these systems,”
says Kelly.
Elsewhere, Paul Routledge, UKI
country manager at D-Link notes
that while operating systems inside
“Whilst 1Gb services offer the majority of businesses sufficient
headroom for the current rates of growth, interest in 10Gb capable
services is on the rise, especially in those businesses leading the digital
transformation revolution.”
NEIL WILSON, HEAD OF PRODUCTS & MARKETING, VIRTUAL1
/www.technologybusinesstoday.com