Laying Foundation For A Dynamic Infrastructure

Mike Aquino, CEO, Overture Networks

Mike Aquino, CEO, Overture Networks

What significant changes did the networking sector witness in 2013? What did these changes mean to vendors and customers?

Enterprises continue to shift applications and compute/storage infrastructure to the cloud, placing increasing importance and burden on Wide Area Network access. This gave rise to new bandwidth-on-demand services from communications service providers (CSPs). Following success with these initial dynamic bandwidth services, enterprises expect to get application management from their CSPs.

What are some of the changes you had anticipated would happen in 2013, but did not happen?

We anticipated more significant deployment of small cells to supplement bandwidth gaps in metropolitan areas. But the industry is still finding its way on indoor and outdoor small cell technology, primarily due to access challenges.

Can you paint us the picture of how landscape for networking sector will change in 2014? What are some of the broader trends you are closely watching?

CSPs are laying the foundation for a new dynamic infrastructure to for rapid creation, activation and assurance of innovative enterprise services. These include personalized, application-aware, managed offerings with self-service options, giving enterprise CIOs control without the burden of managing infrastructure. 2014 will see CSPs deploying cloud-based infrastructure based on Software-Defined Networking and Network Functions Virtualization principals.

Content management and service delivery is pushed closer to the enterprise, magnifying the complexities of the metro service edge. This complexity will be addressed by the new foundation of virtualization and automation.

Can you highlight how the customer spends in this sector will change in 2014? What makes you think customers will be buying more/ less?

As CSPs begin to use the cloud to provide software-driven services, enterprises will look to ‘buy’ rather than ‘create’ their network and application services. To the extent economics allow, the enterprise will hand over more of their infrastructure for less.

What's in store for your company in 2014?

Overture will be in trials and initial deployments of its Ensemble Open Service Architecture for software-defined services at the metro service edge. Service providers will deploy and trial the architecture and associated products to optimize service creation, activation, and assurance for an improved enterprise application experience.

Overture will introduce additional innovative solutions that enable the CSP to offer enterprises flexible, self-managed services unlike anything currently available. It will be at the forefront of highly customizable enterprise services over which their customers will have unprecedented control.