FEATURE: DISRUPTIVE TECHNOLOGY
company needs to be a platform provider.
Most organisations, it is reported, will find
it cheaper and faster to leverage existing
platforms than creating their own.
It may be relatively early days yet for fully-
fledged, home-grown platforms to emerge,
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but there is an unmistakeable move in
that direction.
The companies exploring ways to leverage
this new trend are the ones that will be
leading the pack once this phenomenon is
fully embraced. In as much as Accenture
says the environment in South Africa is
not yet ready, do not be fooled into
believing that these platforms are not
being built and that they will not
dominate future commerce the way that
global giants already own large shares of
the global market. n
Readying your network for the
Fourth Industrial Revolution
As the buzz of the so-
called Fourth Industrial
Revolution gets louder,
what does it mean for
your network?
M
odernised, scalable telecoms
networks are essential for
businesses looking to seriously
embrace the Fourth Industrial Revolution
(4IR), the fourth major industrial era since
the initial Industrial Revolution of the
18th century, characterised by emerging,
disruptive technology breakthroughs. This
is the message from Johann Coetzee,
Managing Director: Commercial at
Datacentrix, a provider of high performing
and secure ICT solutions, who was speaking
at the 2018 Finance Indaba Africa in
Sandton, a high-profile event drawing
finance professional from across the
continent, alongside guest speaker Sean
Taylor, Managing Director at Torch Telecom
Lifecycle Management.
“The Fourth Industrial Revolution isn’t
something that’s looming on the horizon,
it’s already here,” said Coetzee.
He pointed to developed economies that may
be a step ahead of South Africa on the road
to the Fourth Industrial Revolution, noting
that in the UK’s financial services industry,
top-tier banks have closed over 4,000
branches over the past decade.
“That’s more than one per day,” he said.
“And it’s not just financial services
48
INTELLIGENTCIO
companies that need to adapt to this
revolution.” Coetzee said that organisations
in every industry must reposition themselves,
re-platform their architectures, and re-
engineer their business models. Software-defined architectures can
intelligently route traffic, so that certain
mission-critical data is carried over dedicated
MPLS (multiprotocol label switching) links, and
other data is carried over direct Internet links.
“The Fourth Industrial Revolution represents
an exponential leap forward in human science,
technology and innovation, and promises to
alter every aspect of our lives,” said Coetze. This approach has several benefits, he
added, including:
Taylor added: “To truly access and participate
in the shift, the network becomes critical.
“Ultra-fast networks enable a world of new
possibilities – from AI robots, to self-driving
cars, remote medical surgery, immersive
virtual realities, holographic teleportation,
drone deliveries, smart agriculture,
connected cities, and smart logistics.”
But if the network is critical to unlocking all
these possibilities, what does the network of
the future look like?
“The traditional legacy architecture – a
hardware-centric configuration based on
clients and servers configuration – simply
cannot scale,” said Taylor.
“Over time, the costs of maintaining this
infrastructure will billow out of control, as
you fail to keep up with the demand of ever
increasing data throughput.”
Instead, the future involves software-defined
networking (SD-WAN), where the intelligence
of the network lies in the software, which
can more easily be updated, automated and
outsourced to specialist networking partners.
• The optimisation of network capacity
• Increasing available bandwidth with
lower levels of latency
• Ensuring better application performance
• Reducing costs (as you shift some traffic
from expensive MPLS to hybrid WANs)
• Security controls remaining up-to-date all
the time
• Your network becoming ‘cloud-ready’
and able to handle all the demands of a
cloud-first business
• Quick deployment of new branches, or a
boost in capacity as needed
• No outages or downtime (as you failover
automatically to redundant links)
• A network that scales limitlessly as your
demands increase
Coetzee explained that for any organisation
that’s looking to embrace the true potential
for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, they’ll
need a networking partner that can achieve
all these outcomes.
“In fact, we’re reaching a point where one
should be expecting certain guarantees,” he
said. “For instance, Datacentrix can provide
guaranteed networking cost savings (these
would be audited findings from an external
auditing firm) and then bill you by charging
a percentage of these savings.” n
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