Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2019.  Read them in this 11th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

Contributed by Brooks Borcherding, John Smith and Mark Milinkovich, executives at LiveAction

The Future of Network Management

Without fail, new technology innovations emerge each year, presenting a host of networking challenges and opportunities for businesses. From SD-WAN technology, machine learning and multi-cloud deployments to intent-based networking and edge computing, businesses of all types and sizes are hyper focused on digital transformation initiatives and the disruptive technology advancements that support them.

What's more, these developments often spur fundamental changes in the way Network Operations (NetOps) teams approach network management, so it's critical to take a step back each year and assess what new industry shifts might be around the corner in order to develop strategies for capitalizing on and managing them. As 2018 comes to a close, experts at LiveAction are predicting six key ways the network management industry will evolve throughout the coming year:

Brooks Borcherding, CEO at LiveAction

"Adoption of SD-WAN will accelerate and hit more than 50 percent by the end of 2019, far exceeding the already bullish predictions by analysts. This accelerated pace of adoption will be driven by a clear and compelling value proposition that presents companies with significant financial benefits while offering the promise of maintaining (or improving) current application performance and end-user experience. And the rapid emergence of managed enterprise SD-WAN services by global service providers offers a viable alternative to do-it-yourself for resource constrained organizations. We've reached the point in the adoption curve where companies of all sizes will aggressively move forward to capture the financial benefits of SD-WAN technology."

"The trend of consolidation among SD-WAN providers will continue next year, led by a combination of strategic acquisitions from established providers and a couple early innovators. What we're witnessing parallels the emergence of Cloud and the consolidation of first-generation Infrastructure-as-a-Service providers almost 10 years ago. This is when Verizon acquired Terremark, when Time Warner Cable acquired my company, NaviSite, and when IBM purchased Softlayer. And these moves were accompanied by independent firms like Rackspace and, of course, AWS setting the stage for the next phase of Cloud. I predict that we'll see exactly the same trend with SD-WAN, which has already started with early leaders VeloCloud going to VMWare and Viptela being snapped up by Cisco. I expect a couple of the early frontrunners such as Silver Peak to remain, but many others that are struggling to achieve critical mass should exit with a strategic sale."

John Smith, Founder and CTO at LiveAction

"As enterprises continue with multi-cloud adoption in 2019, NPMD vendors will need to cover larger and more complex network footprints for customers by providing increased visibility across existing campuses, WANs, datacenters and public clouds. I expect to see NPMD vendors ingesting more and varied telemetry, and providing more analytics to help organizations understand the distributed and dynamic networks that are increasingly being controlled by software-defined networks (SDN) in each domain. NPMD vendors will need to continue integrating these controllers to help enterprises manage the network from end to end."  

Mark Milinkovich, Director of Product Marketing at LiveAction

"In 2019, digital transformation will continue to drive personalized user experiences (for example, retail's location-based customer loyalty programs). For these to be successful and fluid, NetOps teams will need new levels of network granularity when looking at real-time end-to-end user performance data, including insights by site, by application, and by overlay tunnels and service provider." 

"Network-centric businesses will finally go all-in on creating and supporting NetOps teams as a more agile organizing principle. As a result, next year we'll see these teams demanding more integrated network management platforms that optimize analytics and workflows to enable the consolidation of legacy IT monitoring tools and dashboards (tool sprawl)." 

"In 2019, as the adoption of software-defined networks accelerates, there will be an increase in the number of cloud service portals and screens DevOps is required to monitor. This will put a premium on network monitoring solutions that can deliver comprehensive end-to-end multi-domain, multi-vendor visibility into SD-WAN and SD-Access service overlays and performance KPIs. Organizations that fail to do this will see continued tools sprawl, which will result in added complexity and inefficiency when looking to resolve incidents quickly and/or deliver a premium service."

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