FEATURE: SDN
What are the long-term
benefits of implementing
SDN?
Ravi Mali, director regional sales,
Ciena
The ongoing move to SDN and
network function virtualization
marks a monumental shift in
how networks are structured and
managed. The industry’s historic
closed ecosystems can lock you
into a network architecture that
won’t allow you to innovate or
differentiate your service. By
insisting on an open architecture
network, operators are better
enabled to leverage best-of-breed
technologies and fully unlock the
value of the network.
Charbel Khneisser, Regional
Presales Director, METNA at
Riverbed
Riverbed® SteelConnect™, our
SD-WAN solution, unifies software-
defined connectivity across all
enterprise networks, from the
cloud to hybrid WANs to remote
LANs. SteelConnect transforms
traditional networks into intelligent
software-defined transport
mechanisms designed and
orchestrated by plain-language
policies to deliver applications from
anywhere to anywhere.
Alexandre Gibouin International
Business Development,
Connectivity Business Unit,
IMEAR Region, for Orange
Business Services
SDN is the future of networking
and network as a service and
will bring the same benefits
to networks as cloud services
do to IT. It’s not only about
the cost savings offered by
the network hybridisation
and virtualization but also the
increased flexibility delivered
by the central orchestration,
the service automation and the
self-care portal. As a middle term
evolution, we anticipate more
and more customers will consume
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SDN services through APIs which
will facilitate the integration and
ebonding with their own ITSM
platform. Orange Business Services
is developing the necessary APIs
to digitalise our core services
including connectivity, unified
communication, security and
cloud services.
Mohannad Abuissa, Head of Sales
Engineering - East Region, Cisco
Middle East
Thanks to network abstraction
and automation that reduce
network operations workload, SDN
enables companies to grow their
network to meet demands, and to
scale back if and when necessary.
IT departments can apply a
change once, and it is distributed
across all of the networks, scaling
delivery, and driving new business
models and growth.
Waleed Badr, Regional Director
– META, Nuage Networks from
Nokia
With Nuage Networks from
Nokia, the scale and reach of
datacentre network services
extend as needs grow.
Connectivity to VPN services
ensures that enterprise locations
and datacentres can be part of a
seamless fabric. This is essential
for delivering hybrid cloud
service offerings.
How can a customer measure
the ROI on completion of
their project?
Ravi Mali, director regional sales,
Ciena
The true capex and opex benefits
will only become clear over time,
but the real benefit perhaps lies in
the agility and ability to roll out new
and automated services quicker,
easier, and at a reduced cost when
compared to present methods used.
Charbel Khneisser, Regional Presales
Director, METNA at Riverbed
At Riverbed, we have created
a convenient and free-to-use
SD-WAN ROI calculator. We
understand that IT teams still
face difficulties in securing the
buy in from upper management
when it comes to software defined
solutions and we have made it
easy for them to back their case
with solid figures. Users can adjust
various parameters including the
number of branches, number of
sites, users per site, and total site
bandwidth to help calculate their
potential savings.
Alexandre Gibouin International
Business Development, Connectivity
Business Unit,
IMEAR Region, for Orange Business
Services
A customer should be able to
answer a few key questions like:
how many boxes did I remove
from my existing infrastructure
thanks to the virtualization?
How could I reduce the need for
onsite maintenance intervention
and lower my overall network
management costs? How could
I reuse skilled IT resources
for other business priorities
like the digitalisation of my
business? What are the gains
in productivity achieved by
removing bandwidth bottleneck
in the network?
Swapnil Gupte, Solution Architect,
Enterprise Computing Systems,
Alpha Data
SDN can significantly drive
down capital costs in the long
term because it does away
with purpose-built and fixed
networking hardware and
instead accommodates the
‘pay-as-you-grow’ model that
allows for the addition of
components only as needed. It
also makes design, management,
deployment and scaling easier
as the network grows. Overall,
SDN’s greatest strength is the
ability to allow networks to
keep pace with rapid and
significant change. ¡
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