
Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2019. Read them in this 11th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Mike Bushong, Vice President of Enterprise Cloud Marketing at Juniper Networks
Network Automation, Open Source, SD-Enterprise and More
2019 will be a turning point for the enterprise. In the new
year, we'll see substantial advancements and shifts in enterprise IT, from
network automation becoming more aggressive, open source taking center stage
and SD-WAN shifting towards the enterprise. Change is coming quickly, so
organizations should prepare by creating more aggressive IT strategies to stay
ahead of the curve.
Network automation will hit the curve in the proverbial
hockey stick
Despite years of talking about automation, the vast majority
of enterprise operations are still manual, CLI-driven activities. In 2019,
adoption will shift from linear to something more aggressive.
This will be driven in part by a general need to automate
the network to keep pace with the dynamic application environment that already
exists in many enterprises. But the broader DevOps efforts, especially in the
cloud arena, will demonstrate what operations could look like outside of the
application teams. And enterprises will begin their transformation.
Notably, this means that the automation that emerges will
not be the automation that has been talked about for years. Where the last
decade has been about removing keystrokes in mundane tasks, the real path
forward for network automation will more closely track with the Site
Reliability Engineering (SRE) movement. Expect to see the rise of NRE in
enterprises (a trend that has already started in the major cloud and service
provider properties).
Open source will be more than an alternative business
model
As open source continues to climb in importance in the IT
supply chain, enterprises will begin to develop stronger open source policies.
This will include everything from procurement practices (which partners will be
involved and how will support be handled?) to supply chain (how do you secure
the supply chain if no one is inspecting?).
Enterprises outside of the major open source and cloud
players will begin to treat open source as just another route to market,
implementing appropriate controls, checks, and balances to ensure that products
are robust, support is available, and security is more than a hope.
SD-WAN will begin to yield to SD-Enterprise
It's not that SD-WAN will become less important in 2019, but
as the industry starts applying the principles of SD-WAN more broadly, SD-WAN
will start its evolution to SD-Enterprise. Cloud management and intelligent
routing across the WAN can be transformative for more than the subset of
products currently in market. As campus moves this direction, it seems
inevitable that the concept will broaden.
These changes will impact the reseller market in profound
ways, forcing changes all the way through the supply chain.
Ecosystems will replace vertical suppliers
For decades, the networking space has been dominated by
large, vertically-integrated stacks. With the rise of cloud and multicloud
forcing multi-vendor integration from an operations perspective, it would seem
that the vertical approach to the market will begin to give way to an ecosystem
strategy.
Importantly, that ecosystem will bring suppliers together
that span all of compute, storage, networking, and even applications. Where the
past was led by a well-known set of incumbents, suppliers like Nutanix with
their hybrid and multicloud solutions and RedHat (now IBM) with their
orchestration solutions will take on more prominent roles. This will chip away
at the incumbent routes to market, which will begin a one-way move towards a
more diverse solutions environment.
Campus becomes hot again
A few years ago, data center was all the rage. More
recently, SD-WAN has revitalized the branch. In 2019, expect campus networking
to be in vogue again. Driven by some of the same technologies (SDN, SD-WAN,
intent-based networking, and so on), the campus will go through a similar
transformation. Vendors have retooled their portfolios in preparation, and most
market forecasts showed campus shifting from slow decline to slight growth this
year. That trend should continue.
Notably, the embrace of software as the primary
vehicle for delivering value also means that the days of refresh cycles being
on the order of 5-to-7 years will likely come to an end as well. This should
stoke competition in a market that, frankly, has looked more like a monopoly
than a vibrant ecosystem at times over the last decade. Times, they are
a-changin'.
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About the Author
Mike Bushong is Vice
President of Enterprise Cloud Marketing at Juniper Networks. Mike spent 12
years at Juniper in a previous tour of duty, running product management,
strategy, and marketing for Junos Software. In that role, he was responsible
for driving Juniper's automation ambitions and incubating efforts across
emerging technology spaces (notably SDN, NFV, virtualization, portable network
OS, and DevOps). After the first Juniper stint, Mike joined data center
switching startup Plexxi as the head of marketing. In that role, he was named a
top social media personality for SDN. Most recently, Mike was responsible for
Brocade's data center business as vice president of data center routing and
switching, and then Brocade's software business as vice president of product
management, software networking.