The whole point of a network is just to connect stuff, right? Connect people to people, people to machines, and machines to machines.After all, it’s a cost center not a growth engine. At least, that’s the way it’s treated by most businesses these days.Most, but not all.

In each industry there are a few companies that think differently about the network because they think differently about their business. For these companies, it is a growth engine and a platform for business innovation upon which they deliver amazing new services and create enormous new value.

How can a network fuel business innovation and growth? To understand how this dichotomy can be true, and understand how and why the network should be treated as a strategic asset and revenue growth center, we need to unpack two truths.

• First is the customer connection and co-creation are at the heart of modern business models.
• Rapid delivery of products and services is necessary to support business objectives in a modern business model.

The modern business model

Two things are probably happening in your industry. If not, they’ll happen soon.

• The things you make are getting smarter and are able to talk to you, or each other, or other things, or all of the above.
• What you build into your product is only part of its ultimate value. Your customers are helping to build its value, too. Maybe they’re rating your product for other customers. Maybe they’re giving your other customers advice on how to use or fix your product. Or maybe your customers areyour product (think Facebook, Twitter and Airbnb). The world is going digital. It’s pervasive in your personal life, and it’s coming to your company, too, ready or not. In the digital world, customers help create value. But here’s the conundrum: We live in a new world—where networks that enable co-creation and rapid product delivery are a must—but our networks are built for the old world—where we just build stuff and sell it to people. This new world needs a new network.

A new network?

Here’s where the second part comes into play. If you’re a digital business, you need to be able to change things fast. Amazon makes a change to its production environment every 11 seconds on average. How well do you think your network, or the average business network, would do in this type of dynamic environment?

Modern networks are built for continual micro-changes and have automated a high percentage of the “work” needed to produce the change. This means automating workflows and processes, from mundane network-level provisioning and configuration work to sophisticated interoperation with the storage layer, applications, security and even the user.

Imagine each and every process is the smallest possible version of itself. It stands alone and can be mixed and matched with other processes to create work streams. Imagine the same for each function in a network or the broader IT infrastructure. For example, routing isn’t a function, rather each and every step that a router does is a standalone function, like DNS look up, or route selection.

With this environment, a business can rapidly create new services, products and offerings. The underlying digital infrastructure can respond in real time using automated systems. This is what we mean by making the network into a platform for business innovation. People’s time and talent can be focused on creating value for customers, on creating platforms and environments in which customers can create value for themselves and each other, and where partners can do the same. The result is not simply that the network gets out of the way, but that it accelerates and enhances the ability of the business to innovate and drive new revenue.

How far out is this network utopia?

Getting started isn’t all that hard. As William Gibson once said, “The future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed.” The technologies to do this exist today, and the move to more software-oriented systems will only accelerate the time to value. Google, Facebook, Amazon and other companies do all of this now, and they get huge competitive advantage in time and cost as a result. You can absolutely start down the same path today. Your most significant hurdles will be culture, skills and current processes, which have to be re-evaluated and re-aligned in concert with the goal of innovating at the speed of modern business.

It isn’t necessary to change everything all at once. Most companies begin by automating the physical infrastructure—moving from switches and routers to fabrics, automating network workflows, and implementing basic policy engines. Then they graduate to more advanced capabilities that add agility, such as software-based controllers and software-defined networks (SDN), replacing physical elements with software using virtual network functions (VNF). And eventually they add intelligence in the form of machine learning and advanced analytics.

As you do this, not only do you raise the strategic value of your infrastructure team, but you raise the business value of your infrastructure. It advances from being primarily about connectivity to being primarily about revenue and innovation. It becomes a growth engine for your business, and the network becomes a platform for innovation.

Source: networkworld.com

 

Collaboration technologies such as video conferencing are giving new dimensions to the business communication. Today, video conferencing has taken a central stage in the board room discussion and is helping enterprises to improve team collaboration and creating connections beyond the geographic boundaries.

A Research and Markets report forecasts that the global video conferencing market will touch $6.4 billion by 2020. According to the report, the video conferencing market in Asia Pacific is also expected to achieve significant growth by 2020, driven primarily by increasing demand from countries such as India and China. With organizations adopting flexible work culture, the video conferencing business is set to grow, giving huge prospects to telecommunication solutions vendors.

 Changing face of Communication

Gone are the days, when the business communication was largely driven by emails and telecommunication. Today, video conferencing has become an important part of office meeting routines. Enterprises are deploying video conferencing solutions to enhance both internal and external communication in order to get instant feedback. Video conferencing enables businesses not only increase their productivity but enhance employee and customer relationships through face-to-face interactions using digital tools.

With network bandwidth increasingly dropping in price with improvements in technology, video solutions are also becoming smoother, smarter and more affordable, helping to boost widespread usage.

Business organizations are now looking at flexible solutions, and are shifting towards unified communications (UC) deployments. Peoples’ needs have evolved with time. They are now looking for collaboration tools to be added to applications which will make their communication and work much easier. With network bandwidth increasingly dropping in price with improvement in technology, video solutions are also becoming smoother, smarter and more affordable, helping to boost widespread usage.

Another important factor which is accelerating the growth of the video conferencing market is the growing use of video conferencing applications in industries like healthcare and education. Video conferencing services and cloud-based video conferencing solutions are enabling healthcare organizations to widen the reach of their services to remote areas. In the education sector, video conferencing is enabling educational institutes to offer tutorial and training services to students using video conferencing solutions.

Emergence of Video-as-a-Service (VaaS)

Video conferencing has long moved from equipment to software, web based solutions. While the room-based video conferencing model has a significant share in the market, the cloud based collaboration tools are also gaining traction in the industry. Enterprises are looking at cloud for a reliable, secure and features rich and affordable video-conferencing solutions. Video-as-a-Service (VaaS) has a lot of potential and it has increasingly becoming popular and is coming across as an extremely valuable service. The VaaS market is growing rapidly because of the transition from traditional web conferencing to advance cloud-based conferencing services. The market is expected to witness exponential growth in the next 5 years.

As businesses keep growing and continue to adopt advanced IT infrastructure, the conference rooms in the organizations will become more complicated with too many solutions and services. VaaS will help in clearing the clutter and will be a helpful solution to adopt. So, the future is clearly in cloud and services. However, the room-based video conferencing model will maintain its position in the market.

As businesses keep growing and continue to adopt advanced IT infrastructure, the conference rooms in the organizations will become more complicated with too many solutions and services. Industry experts say that the VaaS model will help in clearing the clutter in the business communication process.

Similarly, Video PaaS products are gaining traction in terms of application in the tele-health, media and entertainment, education, and banking and finance sectors. However, rising concerns regarding data security, increasing quality issues, and lack of a proper business case for real-time communications are the major hindrance in a large scale adoption of Video PaaS business models.

M&A and Expansion Plans

In the era of always connected workplaces, organizations are shifting toward conference meetings in order to enable faster decisions and reduce traveling hassles. Additionally, in order to extend their reach globally, organizations around the world are increasingly focused on investing in cost effective communication tools. This has created immense opportunities for the video conferencing players. Leading video conferencing solution vendors are very aggressive on their expansion plans.

Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are one of the ways for vendors to penetrate into emerging markets. The latest report by Transparency Market Research says the majority of companies operating in the global video conferencing market are focused on expanding their footprint through M&A. Similarly, in order to gain traction across emerging markets, the established companies are collaborating with prominent regional players. Vendors such as Microsoft Corporation, Avaya, Polycom, Huawei Technologies, Vidyo, Cisco Systems, ZTE Corporation, and Lifesize, have been strengthening their position in the global video conferencing market through this strategy.

Growth prospects in India

With various digital projects such as Digital India and Smart City in place, India is the most desirable growth destination for all the major collaboration communication technology vendors. Video is an essential and strategic component of the ambitious smart city and safe city project. Hence, all the prominent vendors are betting big on such projects in the country. Cisco Systems is in talks with several state governments to provide video collaboration solutions in smart city projects. Similarly, Polycom sees a huge opportunity in the initiatives like Digital India, Make in India and plan to raise 100 smart cities. Avaya is also in the race of smart city project and is looking to invest in foray into the initiative with its new Fabric Network Connect technology.

As businesses are going digital, the modes of communications have also gone through significant changes. Today, businesses are open to invest in high quality video collaboration technologies in order to enhance their productivity. Hence, product innovation and go to market strategy will largely determine the success of vendors in this space.

Source: www.cxotoday.com