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There are strong economic and technical drivers transforming branch office operations. Business leaders are growing their branch office operations at a rate of nearly 10% per year. There are multiple factors behind this growth including expanding out of region and global operations, mergers and acquisitions plus tapping into a larger pool of employees and increasing existing employee retention. Not only has there been a large spike in the number of branch office employees but they are also fueling corporate growth strategies and represent a larger share of corporate intellectual property and decision-making. It´s no wonder then that IT budget consumption to support branch office operations is as high as 70%! It is for all these reasons that the corporate network business platform needs to be extended to include branch offices. In this Lippis Report we´ll show you how.

Networking has evolved from a connectivity service to a strategic business platform thanks to the integration of services embedded into the network fabric. Networking technology anticipates systemic changes in how business applications will be written and deployed across networks so as to support unforeseen and future requirements. In doing so branch office network solutions have increasingly integrated services such as network security, application intelligence, IP telephony and wireless LAN access points to increase branch office employees´ productivity while reducing cost. The result of this evolution is that branch office networks are mission critical resources that deliver a wide range of services to the point of being an integral component of the strategic network business platform.

The Old Branch Office Network Model

Overlay after Overlay = High Cost and Unreliability

As branch office network requirements grew many IT leaders simply added networking services through appliances to meet their needs. This was a simple solution with relatively low capital cost to provide IP telephony, WLANs, network security, etc. But as requirements have grown over the past five years so too have the number of appliances. Many IT executives now realized that they had too many appliances to support, all with different management interfaces and configuration rules. Not only does adding multiple appliances increase capital cost but operational cost skyrockets as well. Remember that the average number of branch office locations is nearly 100, which means every branch office investment is increased by two orders of magnitude. With operational cost representing some 90+ percent of branch office network total cost of ownership adding appliances, in retrospect, is penny wise but pound-foolish. In addition to high operational cost reliability is decreased as the number of appliances which can malfunction increases.

Too Many Slow Speed WAN Links

Branch office operations are typically supported through multiple networks such as voice, data, security, fax, etc. Many of these networks, in particular fax, voice and security are aging networks based upon TDM technology. These older analog networks have become more expensive as service providers increase tariffs to entice IT leaders to migrate to new broadband and IP-based networks. As branch offices are usually many miles away from central offices, this distance increases the price of phone and data lines, which tends to limit the amount of bandwidth per branch location a corporation can justify. In the old branch office network model, with as many as four lines entering a branch office to support four separate IT services, wide area network resources or bandwidth tends to be limited for any one service. Inconsistent WAN service among branch locations is another characteristic of older branch office networks thanks to offices being distributed over large geographic distances and between multiple service providers. So not only is bandwidth limited but WAN management is expensive and problematic as netops is forced to manage multiple service providers.

Lack of Network Design = Poor Security + Inconsistent Performance + Lack of Preparation

With the growth of branch offices taking many IT leaders by surprise, many have not architected a solution for their remote offices; rather they have built out their networks in a piece meal fashion. As a result many branch office networks are not fractal, meaning that there is no consistency in design. In short these branch office locations are equipped with different devices and vendors. This inconsistency of design often results in mixed performance between branch office locations. Perhaps most importantly is the fact that piece meal branch office design is less secure, since it is nearly impossible to update all branch office locations with the latest security enhancements and/or exploit signatures. Further, many have limited business continuity plans and are not prepared for man-made or natural disasters. Lack of a mobility solution is a key indictor of this design flaw.

Branch Office Network Best Practices

Thoughtful Design = Improved Performance + Security + Business Continuity

As mentioned above branch office operations are driving growth initiatives and are empowered with decision-making authority. Consequently traffic patterns are following this shift in corporate authority and responsibility. Traffic patterns used to flow hierarchically from headquarters to regional offices to branch offices. Now branch-to-branch flows are layered on top of hierarchical traffic to support executive decision making in the field between branch locations. Branch office network design needs to incorporate this requirement with flexible WAN services and routing.

Integration = Lower TCO + High Reliability

Much of the vendor community has embraced the concept of integrated services in branch office network devices. There are many suppliers of branch office network equipment such as Cisco, Avaya/Juniper, Nortel, Silver Peak, NetD, etc. SilverPeak and NetD are small players in the market. Cisco is by far the market leader having shipped more than 2.3 million Integrated Services Routers (ISR). Their growth rate is impressive too. It took Cisco 18 months to ship 1 million ISRs, but only 9 months to ship their second million — an impressive growth rate. With over 2 million ISRs in production, Cisco is turning the ISR into a business platform equipped with its own ecosystem. More on this below.

Branch office networks require thoughtful design, as its business function is mission critical and TCO high. In fact branch office network TCO is best managed through architecture development and integrated equipment. The best design attributes include the following:

• Consistent design in both network equipment and WAN service
• Converged IP telephony, fax, security and data networking into an Ethernet/IP fabric
• Support for mixed traffic flows both hierarchically and branch-to-branch
• Business continuity and disaster planning through mobility and redundancy in both equipment and WAN access
• Layered network security with multiple defenses included SSL and IPSec VPN, firewall, IPS and Network Access Control/Network Access Protection

The level of integration should be weighted heavily when IT leaders are evaluating branch office network equipment. The latest security, IP telephony, video/surveillance and data technologies should be integrated into a single network device on top of switching and routing functionality. Management and configuration should be simplified with a single interface to all functions as well as virtualized interfaces so that secops, netops, etc may configure and monitor their respective organizational responsibilities. Careful review should be applied to WAN capabilities not only in terms of link support such as DSL, Cable, T1/EI, ISDN, frame relay, MPLS, etc., but WAN optimization and acceleration functionality as well in order to improve the branch office user experience by minimizing network delays in application access. Network security functionality should be comprehensive with integrated VPN, firewall, IPS, NAC, NAP and tunneling. Wireless and wireline Ethernet access should be transparent and integrated with access points being built into equipment, supporting business continuity planning. Functionality such as Power over Ethernet (PoE), real time dial and/or broadband backup should be table stakes.

3G = Diverse Access or Main WAN Link

As mentioned above, Cisco is turning the ISR into a platform. The best example of this came recently in late March ´07 when it announced 3G wireless support in its 1841, 2800 and 3800 ISRs. What was significant in this announcement was that it was made with Verizon Wireless, Sprint, AT&T and Telefonica and Moviles. While 3G is being introduced as a consumer technology, Cisco was able to use the 2.3 million ISRs as a platform to bring this technology to the enterprise. 3G will offer bandwidth between 300kbs to 1Mbs, depending on the service. This joint announcement between Cisco and service providers gives the service providers instant access to the enterprise market to sell new 3G services while offering IT leaders a truly diverse link to branch offices at less than $100 per month or a new primary high speed link option.

By architecting the branch office and integrating its IP telephony, security and management into the corporate IP network, branch office networks become an extension of the corporate network business platform. As branch office operation trends are a result of market realities, business leaders will only increase their corporate investment. To maximize the benefit of more than 70% of IT spend on remote offices, architecting networks with integrated services equipment is clearly the direction of best industry practices.

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By Cisco Systems

This white paper provides an overview of the Cisco® StackWise and Cisco StackWise Plus technologies and the specific mechanisms that they use to create a unified, logical switching architecture through the linkage of multiple, fixed configuration switches. This paper focuses on stack interconnect behavior, stack creation and modification; Layer 2 and Layer 3 forwarding; and quality-of-service (QoS) mechanisms. The goal of the paper is to help the reader understand how the Cisco StackWise and StackWise Plus technologies deliver advanced performance for voice, video, and Gigabit Ethernet applications.

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By Cisco Systems

Applications such as IP telephony are increasingly becoming popular as a growing number of organizations realize the cost and productivity benefits achieved by the convergence of voice, video, and data networks. At the same time, successful deployment and operation rely on the network being able to provide certain crucial capabilities. An important part of IP telephony deployment is the selection of equipment suitable for the task. Cisco® Catalyst® 3750-E Series Switches represent a resilient and scalable switching solution appropriate for IP telephony deployments because they provide specialized capabilities needed for a successful deployment of IP telephony, reduced operating costs and investment protection.

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Inbar Lasser-Raab Cisco’s Director of Marketing for Enterprise Routing joins the Lippis Report podcast to discuss strategies to extend your networked business platform to branch offices. The economy has forced businesses to be closer to customers, prompting leaders to shift resources into branch offices. Branch office employees demand the same level of IT services as headquarter offices. Branch offices are spread out over large geographic distances driving up wide area network and operational cost; challenging IT solutions with low bandwidth and spotty support. But there are winning strategies that eliminate these traditional trade-offs. Hear about them by downloading this podcast.

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The campus network is a structural component of the network business platform. No other part of IT has the ability to deliver real corporate value like the campus network does. A disproportionate number of IT and business assets flow across and interact with a campus network. The evolution of computing and applications toward integrating personal and back-office computing environments is occurring over and in the campus network and in its wake is re-defining IT architecture and its relationship to the business platform. As the lines and boundaries of data center, storage, computing, applications and networking blend and blur IT architecture will evolve into a single corporate asset which spans the entire campus network, from the data center, through the campus, across desktops and laptops to mobile end-points. The campus network is changing into an agile and flexible fabric, able to change its configuration and properties based upon application flow to deliver optimized application performance with the goal of improved user experience and satisfaction. In short, campus networking requirements and thus design are fundamentally changing.

IT departments are required to support real-time multimedia services, seamless wired and wireless connectivity, virtualized resources, Web 2.0 applications and much more. On top of these new requirements is the fact that it´s been over six years since the Y2K build-out and many IT departments have not updated their campus networks since then. The result is that many campus networks are based on old technology while businesses require new applications and demands.

Shift in Traffic Profiles

Applications such as Microsoft´s Vista OS and Office Groove 2007 with their peer-to-peer developer links will wreak havoc on networks designed for client-server flows. Readers note, all campus networks were designed for client-server flows. Peer-to-peer networking allows Microsoft to short circuit Linux by minimizing data centers´ client-server flows with new computer-to-computer traffic. But it´s not just Microsoft who is leading the change away from client-server; Google is, too, as are services like BitTorrent, eDonkey/eMule, YouTube, Skype and many others.

Peer-to-peer networking is well on its way to dominating traffic types. CableLabs, the research organization of the North American cable industry, believes that BitTorrent could represent 55% of the upstream traffic on the cable company’s access network. CacheLogic puts that number at roughly 35% of all traffic on the Internet. As peer-to-peer networking grows traffic profiles and patterns will shift away from client-server toward a more multi-directional and unpredictable patterns. Unified Communications and communications-enablement are two additional and very large drivers delivering real-time collaboration among employees, suppliers, partners and customers which need to be factored into campus network design.

Campus Network Architecture

Campus network architecture needs to anticipate and support these trends by incorporating attributes that embrace these dynamics. Campus networks need to be application fluent, support virtualization, provide non-stop or fault tolerant operation with integrated security and be flexible enough to support all types of traffic flows. Yes, speed has always been a hallmark of campus networks, which have traditionally driven Ethernet´s five year, ten-time increase in speed cycle.

It´s not that bandwidth isn´t important; it is and industry data proves the point. Gigabit to the desktop is driving the need for 10 Gigabit Ethernet uplinks. 10 Gigabit Ethernet as well as 10/100/1000 multi-speed card sales are up while fast Ethernet is flat to down. The IEEE Higher Speed Study Group recently started the standards process for 100 Gbs Ethernet. So speed is very much a part of campus networks and will continue to be, but it´s not the sole attribute. Scale is no longer simply associated with connectivity, control and availability, but now campus network services need to scale to support new requirements.

With that said, campus network architecture is and will continue to be based upon a three-tier physical structure of end-point connectivity aggregating into a distribution layer which is connected via a core. In multi-building campus networks, cores are connected via high speed 1 to 10Gbs links going to 40 and eventually 100Gbs. This physical architecture will remain the same; however the placement of services and intelligence will change to support the networked business platform. For example, electrical power is not normally thought of in terms of networking, but it´s a service that the network is now delivering. Power over Ethernet or PoE is a major requirement for a campus network to support as it provides power for unified communications end-points, wireless access points, surveillance cameras, etc.

Guiding Principals

The bottom line is that a new campus network architecture is emerging that is based upon logical services rather than physical components. Network architecture is the bridge between business strategy and evolution. The best way to think about the new design rules for campus networks is through the use of guiding principals. I offer the following six design principals which will transform your campus network into a network business platform:

Principal One: Design for Fault-Tolerant or Non-Stop Communications

As campus networks are critical infrastructure components their operation needs to be designed for 100% up time, ensuring application availability. This is accomplished through redundant links and equipment so that a resilient campus infrastructure is realized. Redundant power systems in switches and routers will ensure that loss of power will not bring down the business platform, especially as voice and surveillance systems, in addition to critical data, flow across and interact with campus network elements. The ability to perform full image in-service software upgrades is important to keep the campus operational during times of upgrade while in service maintenance ensures business continues even when elements are being maintained.

As networks support more applications (voice, video, building control, surveillance systems, etc.) their status as a critical business platform increases. For example, network outages usually always result in loss of business, lower customer satisfaction and loss of business productivity. Adhering to Principal One, fault-tolerant communications will reduce downtime, increase productivity and customer/employee satisfaction, thanks to high availability. Principal One will also reduce network outages that translate into business outage with their resulting consequences of lost reputation and even potential law-suits.

Principal Two: Think Virtual

Virtualization offers powerful benefits in the areas of dynamic resource allocation and service utilization by carving out logically separate networks and control domains within a shared infrastructure. Virtualization maximizes asset utilization in the campus network. Some examples are helpful. Virtualization of the network layer allows a company to support multiple diverse business policy environments. Many corporations require separation of data, workflow, work product and information flow. This could be due to regulatory issues, a merger, outsourcing and diverse lines of business or private/government-focused divisions within a corporation.

Virtualization of the network layer also allows a company to collapse multiple parallel networks such as video surveillance, HVAC, Voice over IP, Video over IP and data onto a single network infrastructure while providing isolation of these networks safeguarding data or organizational control. Virtualization can also apply to functions performed by the network by integrated network modules in campus switches, such as firewalls and application services. The ability to virtualize these devices allows a single device to serve multiple lines of business or multiple security zones with separate management and reporting that is often necessary.

Virtualization enables the construction of secure guest or contractor access to defined network resources. It also allows IT executives to segregate departments for compliance requirements such as separating human resources from finance. These virtualized segmentations are logical and thus can be guided by business requirements.

Principal Three: Operational Management Excellence

Perhaps the most overlooked and undervalued principal during equipment acquisition is operational management. This is due to the difficulty of assigning budget to operational tools and network gear with built-in software features. But its value is deep. Operational management can accelerate service implementation, ease and lower the cost of management, automate infrastructure management and facilitate plus document changes.

Traffic flow analysis plays a large role in operational management. For example, traffic flow analysis through tools like deep packet inspection provides an in-depth view of the campus network traffic breakdown and associated performance. This insight allows IT executives to plan for growth, tweak application performance, optimize existing infrastructure and locate problems. Some vendors provide solutions to provide the ability to track network assets as well as ?¢‚Ǩ?ìTagged" non-network assets such as hospital equipment, A/V devices, and potentially unwanted devices like rogue Access Points providing IT operational personnel with a full view of the network and all devices and applications which reside within it. The benefit to IT executives is lowered operational costs when automation is able to provide information necessary to control the network, locate assets, and accelerate deployment of new features, applications and business initiatives.

Principal Three is key to enabling businesses to change and grow, thus meeting its objectives. Strong and automated operational management delivers a benefit to users by minimizing user downtime in network maintenance/operations.

Principal Four: Design for Integrated Security

Principal Four states that the campus network will support integrated security services, which include pervasive security policies and built-in protections for access, identities, resources and content. Without integrated network security IT executives cannot deliver on availability or reliability. Guaranteed uptimes, non-stop performance and business process protections will be impossible to achieve; and there are the many regulatory and legislative conformance requirements to deal with as well.

Integrated security ensures regulatory requirements, safeguards client identity and application/data confidentiality and provides pro-active threat detection and containment. From a business reliability point of view, integrated security is an absolute must principal.

Principal Five: Ensure Application Fluency

Application fluency is one of the most important principals, as it will have a direct impact on user experience. Application fluency or awareness means that the campus network recognizes applications, and controls traffic accordingly to ensure delivery. Application fluency allows the campus network to react to network congestion and guarantee response times at the application layer for critical applications. Many applications are imbedded in web browser windows; therefore, campus networks need to see deep into traffic flows to provide service level performance required by most critical applications. The ability to look deep into network traffic provides security benefits as well. Deep packet inspection in the campus network allows it to protect itself from malicious or misbehaving applications. Principals Three and Five are linked in that they both build upon packet inspection.

Principal Six: Unified Network Services For Mobility

There are multiple networking options for mobile users and data center connectivity. The campus network plays an important role in unifying these networks so that people can connect to any resource and/or person through any device and obtain consistent services and performance independent of wired or wireless access. Consider mobility. To deliver mobility, the ability to support diverse media end-points such as cell phones, laptops, PDAs, desktops, phones, video terminals, etc., using diverse media connectivity including wireless, wired and cellular, becomes essential for the network to deliver. Campus networks which are able to offer mobile solutions where wireless services are built directly into switching and routing platforms allow the enterprise to extend services throughout the campus. This approach offers an electrical power advantage also, as scalable power services to closet switches in which to power phones, access points and other end-points are provisioned and can scale as future power service requirements grow.

Principal Six delivers the business value of offering any application to any screen´s end-point, which increases productivity thanks to increased application access.

If you follow the six guiding principals your company will be rewarded with a more responsive business that achieves its business goals and objectives through IT. Business process will run smoother as operations shift from reactive to a more proactive management posture. An improved productivity and user experience will result too. Peace of mind through network security and business continuity will also be achieved as will lower operational cost.

Clearly these benefits are subjective and highly dependent upon pre-existing network conditions. In my experience very few IT organizations architect their networks. Rather they choose vendors, equipment, software and services for each requirement or project with which they are confronted. The result is similar to house construction. Often consumers can choose a builder´s package and save a few dollars or do it right and hire an architect to customize a solution for their needs. The architected solutions can cost more and at times take slightly longer but the pay-back is big. You can always tell an architected home. The rooms are pleasing to the eye, the space is planned out and works well, rooms flow into each other and the home sits perfectly on its land. The builder´s package often comes with odd-sized rooms, a poor flow, disproportionate windows and doors and the feeling that something is just not right. Often times additional work is done and paid for to fix these anomalies or the buyer lives with dissatisfaction.

In IT an architected solution is business driven and provides an excellent experience for employees, customers, partners and suppliers. The interfaces work well, performance is within human delay tolerances, shifting between applications is painless and work just flows. The IT systems are not frustrating and fatiguing to work with, but support business process as effortlessly as possible.

The time to use the above guiding principals is every time a new project is being evaluated. Have the IT team review every major design decision by applying each of the guiding principals and discussing them, one by one, to ensure that the campus network design supports the principals. Don´t move forward until there is agreement that the architecture supports the principal. Over time the campus network will take on more and more of the attributes identified above.

While I discuss the pay-off above, there is one other item to consider. Campus networks will evolve to be more responsive to applications to the point of auto-configuring to improve application performance and user experience. For example, a group may start a telepresense session and the network will detect this event and respond by configuring VLANs and QoS to ensure excellent performance. Building a campus network with the above principals will set your campus network up to be able to deliver that type of dynamic application agility.

The campus network is a structural component of the network business platform which means it demands thoughtfulness in design.

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I am joined by Kumar Srikantan, Senior Director of Internet Switching Business Unit at Cisco to discuss systemic IT changes which are driving new design principals for campus networking. IT departments are required to support real-time multimedia services, multi-directional traffic, seamless wired and wireless connectivity, virtualized resources, automated management, etc. In this podcast Kumar and I discuss how these IT trends have forced campus networking to evolve beyond a connectivity service to a strategic business platform by delivering network services. One key attribute of new campus network design is the ability of the network to detect specific applications and alter its configuration to deliver the best performance and experience to users. Now that is strategic. You need to listen to this podcast. Enjoy, Nick.

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By Cisco Systems

The world has evolved into a global village. Businesses see the need to establish their presence in strategically important areas and gain from unique partnering and customer opportunities. Branch-office users comprise 30 to 90 percent of enterprise employees globally, with remote locations and users consuming 70 to 90 percent of business resources. To be successful, these employees require access to the same applications, systems and tools as employees located at a corporate headquarters. But the cost and complexity of owning and operating a full-service branch are difficult to predict. Does the existing equipment have enough headroom to support branch-office growth needs? What are the complexities in introducing a new application in the branch office? Is there a significant cost and learning curve to implement a new solution?

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Marie Hattar, Ciscos Senior Director, Network Systems Marketing joins the Lippis Report Podcast to explore issues of network architecture as the blue print and framework for the new networked business platform. The increased stature and value of networking within corporate IT is discussed as well as its attributes and business value. Lippis and Hattar propose that networking is the new business platform and provide guidance to IT executives on how best to leverage their networking investment for corporate advantage. Enjoy, Nick

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The network is the new business platform. Networking is evolving well beyond its initial role as a connectivity service as unified communications, network access control, network virtualization, mobility, application fluency, location services, etc., are embedded into the network fabric and are ?¢‚Ǩ?ìcallable" entities to application developers. This increased value in networking which can be molded and shaped by IT developers to achieve corporate goals is the genesis of the new business platform. Business platforms are launch points, which deliver value to customers, suppliers and partners while offering corporate differentiation.

The term business platform has multiple meanings depending on who´s using it. IT vendors have taken the term to usually mean a programming language, operating system, database or all of the above. Management consultants usually define business platform as an infrastructure by which business is enabled and conducted. In this Lippis Report I propose that the IP network is the new business platform. Networking is taking this new strategic position within corporate boards and IT executive management due to the growing number of services, which are embedded in the network infrastructure.

In eras gone by computing environments were business platforms. First it was IBM´s system 360 mainframe architecture, which automated back office business process and extended that process around an organization thanks to SNA. Then Digital Equipment Corporation, HP and Data General´s mini-computers extended back office automation further by lower computing price points so that business units and departments could automate their own business process. During this time, local area networks and peer-to-peer networking such as DecNet, TCP/IP, OSI, et al., was invented to connect these systems in an effort to share these expensive resources. Then came Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Michael Dell et al., who ushered in the personal computing era to speed up personal business process with spreadsheets, presentation development, communications, etc. At the same time as the PC came to market networking became big business as its main service was to connect PCs and peripherals over local and wide areas.

The computing players continue to compete over operating system features and price points. But the real value to corporate operations and the next major wave of productivity is in the linking and integrating of the personal and back-office computing environments. This linking will evolve into a single corporate asset that resides deeply within its corporate network. Networking has evolved well past its connectivity service which was the basis of its value proposition to IT. Services such as unified communications, IT security, location services, storage access and mobility are the new building blocks of the new business platform. All of these network services are callable entities, which can be molded and shaped by developers as Web Services and SOA becomes the de-facto IT developer environment. No longer will IT developers and networking departments be at odds as developers routinely write applications assuming LAN performance. IT developers will write directly to the network rather than to a computer, which resides in a data center or department.

Right now there is a huge industry battle taking shape in the unified communications space with Microsoft/Nortel´s ICA challenging Cisco and Avaya. The winner will be corporations as competition over unified communications will spark innovation and downward price point reduction. Unified communications will lead to communications enablement or what Microsoft/Nortel call ?¬¢‚Äö√ᬮ?√¨business transformation" in which IT developers embed communications deeply into business process by writing corporate applications which invoke communications to speed up workflow by eliminating human and system delay from business process. Communications-enablement is the key example of how the network is the new business platform as unified communications is based upon IP telephony being embedded into a corporate IP network.

The network infrastructure players are busy adding value to their offerings by integrating network virtualization, service expansion and device consolidation, unified networking, non-stop networking, application fluency, and on-demand secure access. Please see Lippis Report Issue 71: Networking Futures The Direction Ahead for more detail on this topic.

With the above as background, the following podcast discussion between Nick Lippis, President Lippis Enterprises and Zeus Kerravala, SVP of The Yankee Group´s Enterprise Research defines the network as the new business platform.

Nick: Zeus and I are sharing thoughts on the network as the new business platform. If you look at all of the resources that an IT department has at its disposal to deliver business value, clearly they have desktop resources or assets, server assets, data center assets, back office software, so forth and so on. If you think about the network itself, it´s the only true horizontal IT asset. Meaning that, it touches all things that an IT department has by default, because it connects all these devices together. The concept is that there are a couple of things that are happening with the network. When the network has been evolving from a connectivity resource, which is the basic resource that it has always provided to connect things up and provide connectivity into a broader range of services that can deliver deeper business value. Now with the confluence of a couple of key trends, such as web services and SOA, and all the different kinds of services that are being bundled and embedded into networks today such as policy services, network management, presence services, IP telephony services, security services, location services, there are a lot of services buried and bundled within a network fabric. But now these services are being opened up to be called upon by developers, so now no longer does a developer need to know where a particular resource might be in their IT arsenal, but can essentially call services and allow the network to find them. That´s the concept we´re going to explore here with pros and cons. We´re calling it the network as a new business platform.

Zeus: I think to start, there are a number of things that happened technologically that enabled us now and the combination of virtualization and IT networks actually allow us to take things that used to be physical resources and make them virtual resources that we can scatter around a network. The impact that IT networks have can´t be understated. When you think about how things work at the IP layer, you no longer need to know where they are, but that they´re there because of the way IP protocol works. When you think of how your email works on your laptop, you plug into a network. You don´t care really where it is, it just magically goes and finds it. You can extend that all the way down to the data center of the computing platforms. If you think of VM running on a bank of blade servers, you can actually create a bunch of logical servers that become part of the network and get called as you need resources. You can do the same things with storage resources or a lot of things that you mentioned with regards where presence of authentication or identity can be replicated that way as well. The development of virtualization IP networks makes the network the computing platform for the virtual enterprise.

Nick: That´s a great way to put it as the network to the platform for the virtual enterprise. That´s a great tagline. That sounds great.

Zeus: I think that we should trademark that.

Nick: I love this concept because the way that the marketplace or the industry has been evolving is that we offer new services into the network in the form of appliances. We have switches, routers, access points, and all the major foundational technology, but now whenever we´re looking for a new service to be added it´s added by an appliance. That appliance over time then gets absorbed into other parts of that core network, whether it be switches or routers, and so forth. There´s a natural revolution on how technology is introduced and tested in the marketplace, how the market can consume it and modify it and then the vendors can optimize its placement and deployment within an enterprise. Moore´s Law and Metcalf´s Law are combining to predict that IP networking is becoming a big black hole, sucking in all previous generations of legacy technology, and we´ve seen this over and over again in our industry, from the huge $600 billion telecommunications networks being absorbed and replaced in essence enhanced by IP networks; the national entertainment systems that we use that produce our TV entertainment is also in the midst of a major shift and a black hole moving into IP. We see this in essence through TiVo, Apple iTUNES, downloading movies, and having those devices within an IP fabric. You have all of that mobility, freedom and flexibility to move them around in your home or office. You can display them on different kinds of things. This whole concept of the network as this business platform is basically the movement towards which the industry is moving us. Moore and Metcalf guide us as every generation of legacy technology is engulfed by the IP network. There is an unleashing of innovation around that particular technology that opens up possibilities that we´ve never had before. Look at communications and what we´ve had on phones, features stayed static for a good hundred years as it migrated from analog to digital. We moved digital to IP over the last ten years. The progression and the rate of change have just been huge – off the charts. The same thing will be just as true as we start to move more and more legacy services into IP. As we get more of these services into the IP fabric, it opens up opportunity for developers that were never there before; or, they were there, but the interfaces of the sockets to connect something that´s kind of off network to on network is huge and they break with limited functionality and so forth. There is a new framework emerging in the marketplace that networking beyond all the other assets we have in an IT arsenal is becoming the central area for business development wrapping applications and services around profit drivers.

Zeus: I think that you touched on a lot of points there. If you look at the example of VoIP, I think that will be the first of many VoIP´s to follow integrated into the network. If the network vendors and operators aren´t careful it can also be run right on top of it. Some of these have become verbs in everyday life. You look at something like skype; ?¬¢‚Äö√ᬮ?√¨we´re going to skype each other now." Slingbox is another example of that. Where we´ve taken cable TV, which was once a service that had to be bought as part of the network, and moved in and virtualized it to be something that runs on the network. Now I can take my cable TV and use something like Slingbox and be able to pipe that wherever I want. So now it´s allowed me to virtualize something that was once tied to a network. What´s often missed in the industry is the impact that VoIP has had. It´s never been about convergence Nick. If we wanted convergence we would have done ATM. Voice over IP, the first part of IP was doing it over IP. When you do things over IP you make them portable and accessible anywhere. Many of these services that we have today, I have no idea where they´re hosted, where they´re run, I have no idea if they´re in the US; I just use them and they work great. Extend that down away from an application, down to components of applications, maybe someone offers a global authentication service. Maybe one of the mobile operators offers to become fact of standard resource for location-based services. There is infinite possibility here. I think that no one thought enough about this and the network. We´ve rapidly shifted into an environment where the huge hoops in SKYPE figured out this method and a way to do this. You´ll see much more advancement to this in the next few years. The advent of multi-core processors makes it possible to run many more things virtually and allows us to do more with this black hole that you´ve aligned.

Nick: It´s interesting as I look at the confluence of a lot of these trends; Steve Jobs did a great job with the introduction of the iPHONE. We have communications highly integrated into a network fabric. The man-machine metaphor is simple and intuitive; you have business, entertainment, and communications access. It´s a great example of things to come as the industry wraps its mind around the possibility available as all IT assets are sucked into the IP black hole.

Zeus: One of the difficult things for IT departments to deal with though, and I focus a lot of our research at Yankee around this concept, is consumerization of the enterprise. A lot of the technology that we use today for business purposes; things like instant messaging, skype for business, even email to some extent, was a consumer technology that eventually found its way into the enterprise. The consumerization of the enterprise continues to happen at a faster and faster pace and what IT doesn´t want to become is a bottleneck. I think that cattling all these different technologies is a challenge, because they´re all delivered over IP. It does make it easier, but I think that´s where the innovation is being done right now.

Nick: That´s a great point. I think you hit it right on the head. The rate of change is clearly a lot faster in a consumer space because obviously you don´t have to think about a lot of installed base. Wireless LANS were a great example of that. We were building them in project 802.11 for enterprise use, but vendors figured out that we have a security problem in the enterprise marketplace, but we don´t necessarily have that problem in the home market, so they decided to go there first and drive the price points down so we can enter into that marketplace. Price points were low enough thanks to our Asian manufacturing and production; we were able to get it into the marketplace. People experienced it and then they wanted it into their offices. VoIP has been to a degree the same way with skype, Vonnage, and other types of VoIP based services. So we´ve seen these waves of technology that have been focused on the consumer space that have made their way into the enterprise. I think that what that does to IT organizations is that it makes it hard for them if they´re not proactive or getting ahead of this curve. It makes it hard for them to take advantage of.

Zeus: I think the reason that it scaled to consumer businesses is because the way they have gone to market. One of the things that companies have to prepare for is the concept of an IT department of one. So, you Nick Lippis are able to facilitate what you want to do with your systems. The example I use for that is, take a look at consumer space right now. The companies that are of high value YouTube, MySpace, SecondLife, CraigsList, eBay, this list goes on and on, these companies don´t do anything except facilitate. What they´ve done is created an environment where there is a web portal built and they´ve created tools to allow people to self administer and self create content; self collaborate. CraigsList is a really bad interface, but it´s very simple and plain and relatively easy to use. The concept is the structure that´s been put in place is a facilitation structure. Companies need to look at and take some lessons from these social networking sites, auction sites and put some structure in to allow the users to become the IT department of one. So all the policy and security features remain in place, but you allow the user to be able to create any conflict, collaborate with whoever they want and not let IT be that bottle neck. The network then allows for the facilitation to happen.

Nick: That´s a great point and an interesting model. The popular sites are facilitators and aggregators; well more facilitators than anything else.

Zeus: Yeah, they don´t do anything.

Nick: IT departments have been the direct opposite. They´ll basically do everything for you, or they try to do everything for you. Mainly because you have professionals in non-IT jobs who believe it´s not their job to do anything around IT. Where you have more IT savvy professionals, is the next generation coming out of engineering and business schools, that understand the technology and want to have more control over it rather than having it spoon fed and dictated over to them. So I think that´s an interesting model on how IT departments might take advantage of the support dimension and the creative environment where their services can be highly customized towards individuals and business and allow that interest, innovation, and the drive they have to take IT and use it for their business. This allows them to do that without their IT being dictated to them, but IT provides general guidelines, an interface, an architecture and allows them to have it with some constraints and control around security.

Zeus: I certainly think it´s generational. I don´t think that my Dad would want to become an IT department of one, but I do think that my ten year old will. In some sense we are the watershed group of workers.

Nick: To take advantage of the network as the business platform, IT departments do not have to abandon any of their IT resources but wrap their mind around the network as a basic building foundation for a business platform and move away from these stove pipe vertical kinds of development that they normally go through.

Zeus: It comes back to IT as the creator and IT as the facilitator. The way you do that is to create an underlying foundation of technology that can be served up from the network to different types of devices, end-points, or networks. Keep all that stuff transparent to the user. For instance, with yourself you don´t really care what kind of network this is running on or what kind of devices this is running on. In the infrastructure there is a place to facilitate all of that yourself. For the IT department it´s important to be forward thinking enough to be willing to relinquish a lot of control of creation of what the user sees and does and become a facilitator of information and resources then the actual creator of the actual end product. I think that the end user actually knows what they want, or at least they soon will and what they would like is the ability to do that.

Nick: We should spend another Podcast on the new role of IT in this network platform environment. I think that there are a lot of great concepts that you´ve put out on the table. What does this mean for an organization design point of view, a social contract, with users and IT departments as well? There´s a whole set of thinking that can be developed here.

Zeus: It´s an interesting concept that I think is going to be coming upon people a lot faster than they thought, and they´ll need to prepare for it sooner. I think that we can take a lot of lessons from the consumer space. If my thesis is right, and I think it is, that the rate of change that the enterprise has compacted from consumer technology will slowly increase not diminish.

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By Cisco Systems

Networks have evolved from closed infrastructures to integrated systems that enable organizations to work more closely with employees, partners, customers, and vendors worldwide by connecting and automating business processes and applications. Bringing applications to the Internet has had a dramatic impact on productivity and profitability – but it has also increased risk of attacks.

Security breaches can occur from a wide range of sources, including a company’s own networked PCs and servers. New worms and viruses are targeting network end-points. This is of particular concern to small and medium-sized offices, which often have limited IT resources to combat these challenges. Cisco Systems prepares organizations for attacks by helping them build self-defending networks with dramatically improved capabilities to identify, prevent, and respond to threats. An important component of the Cisco Secure Network Foundation and the Cisco Self-Defending Network is the new generation of Cisco integrated services routers. These routers are the first to deliver secure, wire-speed data, voice, video, and other advanced services to small and medium-sized businesses and enterprise branch offices.

This white paper focuses on the changing security landscape and the embedded security features of Cisco 800, 1800, 2800, and 3800 Series Integrated Services Routers. Market trends point to growing customer demand for concurrent integrated services in small businesses; this paper outlines the value of integrating security within the router. It also illustrates how the Cisco Smart Business Roadmap and a unique systems approach from Cisco effectively address security challenges today and well into the future.

This paper is not a technical deployment guide. Rather, it explains how Cisco is merging best-in-class network security technology with more than 20 years of routing expertise to redefine network security and provide customers with end-to-end network protection.

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By Cisco Systems

Today´s business realities are changing the communications landscape, accelerating convergence and integration. For example, the ubiquitous cell phone is no longer just a phone. It has now morphed into an integrated MP3 player, a camera, a camcorder, web browser, walkie-talkie, a storage media, an authentication device, allowing text messaging and e-mail : the capabilities are endless. Likewise, a computer is no longer just a fast computing machine, but a true multimedia end-point capable of serving as a DVD player/recorder, a VoIP phone, an audio player, a game machine, and even a TV, as well as a work system. Wherever one looks, the trend is obvious : integrated services and applications are being delivered in a smaller form factor, resulting in enhanced productivity and efficiency to the end user. Over the past few years, Cisco has assumed industry leadership in applying this innovative concept to a domain that is considered mission-critical: the branch router. The result is the highly successful Cisco Integrated Services Router (ISR) with over 2 million sold in a little more than two years. This white paper discusses the concept of Integrated Services as they apply to the branch router and how they help to create the empowered branch for small-to-medium business, large enterprises, and service providers offering managed services.

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Zeus Kerravala, SVP of The Yankee Group´s Enterprise Research joins Nick Lippis to discuss and define the network as the new business platform. Networking is evolving well beyond its initial role as a connectivity service as location, unified communications, network access control, network virtualization, mobility, application fluency etc are embedded into the network fabric and are ?¬¢‚Äö√ᬮ?√¨callable" entities to application developers. This increased value in networking that can be molded and shaped by IT developers to achieve corporate goals is the genesis of the new business platform. Zeus and I define and discuss the importance of this new role for networking within IT and the boardroom.

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I interview Robert Redford and Greg Mayfield of Cisco to understand their Services Oriented Network Architecture, or SONA. While all major IP telephony firms have positioned WebServices/SOA as the new communications application development platform, Cisco focuses on the network as the IT platform. Cisco uses SONA to position the network beyond a connectivity service to a platform with callable services such as location, authentication, presence, call control, etc. It is a great discussion for anyone interested in where IT is going.

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