Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2022. Read them in this 14th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Four Network Transformations We’ll See Take Shape in the Year Ahead Impacting Service Providers
By Sally Bament, Vice President of Cloud & Service Provider Marketing at Juniper Networks
This past year, networks have been vital to digital business – from enabling essential operations to providing connectivity across the globe for work and education to delivering strategic insights. But as businesses continue their digital transformation to better prepare for the future, networks must evolve to accommodate growing traffic demands, more devices and users, increased security threats, heightened user expectations, new use cases and more.
To meet the needs of this evolving future, service providers will need to focus on transforming their networks, in addition to their operations and their businesses, and provide a seamless and assured service experience for next year and beyond. Here are a few key trends we expect will take shape as service providers begin their next network transformation.
Metro networks will begin their much-needed transformation: Metro networks will play a more critical role in new profitable and innovative services delivery, as the place in the network where connectivity, hosting and service experience converge. The metro is the future of services and will need to be reimagined in the coming year. As a result, we will see network operators move away from traditional siloed metro architectures built from the transport up to a refreshed design focused on service delivery, coupling IP connectivity with hosted elements and content, along with security and automation. Emerging 5G and edge services present a once-in-a-generation opportunity for service providers. Using concepts like network slicing, dynamic edge compute and automation, they will start to roll out exciting new enterprise and consumer applications on converged metro fabrics that simply weren’t possible before.
Broadband market transformation will pick up steam: There is a new service provider buying cycle in broadband network infrastructure buildouts driven by a variety of factors: evolving architectures, growth in work from home, increasing bandwidth and low latency demands, and new government infrastructure incentives. The performance ramifications of emerging service offerings to support 5G, IoT and UHD Video, among others, are pressuring network operators to seek new economies of scale to financially right size while they seek to boost capacity without increased costs. Consequently, the market will start to transition from centralized/traditional architectures to exploit distributed, horizontally and vertically disaggregated, and converged wireline and wireless broadband solutions.
Private 5G will unlock new innovations: Private 5G is poised to become a $5.7B industry by the end of 2024, according to industry observers. With its low latency and enhanced security, private 5G will give enterprises the platform they need to implement breakthrough applications that require near-real-time responses and actions, as well as faster data processing for AI/ML. The adoption of private 5G is set to transform sectors like health care, gaming, manufacturing and emergency services, with production deployments becoming more common over the next 18-24 months. Next year, we will see enterprise organizations begin the process to take advantage of these opportunities and, in doing so, look to service providers to help them make significant progress toward rolling out next-generation applications and achieving breakout business value.
Demand for adoption of 400G will skyrocket: The market for 400G is exponentially increasing as the world transforms digitally. Although there is no Moore’s law equivalent for the pace at which network traffic grows, a similar dynamic is in effect. Every new application and advancement depends on moving more and more data for it to succeed. Think 4K/8K and remote work or IoT and artificial intelligence and machine learning. Next up: the metaverse and virtual worlds. As traffic levels continue to grow, we will see network operators accelerate the adoption of 400G to future-proof networks for what lies ahead. What’s more, future-looking network operators will get ready for the next big increase in demand by choosing platforms capable of supporting a seamless transition to 800G when needed.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sally Bament is vice president of cloud & service provider marketing at Juniper Networks, responsible for driving awareness, preference and demand for Juniper’s industry-leading networking solutions. She brings more than 25 years of experience in executive leadership, marketing, product management, business development, and M&A in the networking, telecommunications and cloud industries.
