
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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