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December/January 2017
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MIKE PATTERSON
DAVID BYRD
ALAN PERCY
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TR T
have with UC solutions. As growing businesses adopt UC technology, they may dip their toes in the water by leveraging collaborative capabilities rst. ink chat and instant messenger,
which are easy to adopt and function much
like Facebook Messenger and other social media chat applications. In fact, a Salesforce’s Benchmarks’ for Small Business Growth report found that in 12-18 months a little more than half of small business service teams plan to grow chat 52%.
3) PRODUCTIVITY GAINS
And last but not least – now more than ever, productivity and speed of output are critical for small and medium businesses as they operate in an increasingly competitive world. According to the SBA, there has been a 42% increase in small businesses since 1982, resulting in 28 million small businesses in the U.S. alone.
In a separate survey, Jabra found that call- centric workers, such as those who support customers or serve in an advisory capacity, are more productive and 25% more engaged in their jobs when enabled with the right supporting technologies.
SMBs adoption of UC solutions is in support of their need to access the right tools to be fast, exible and e cient so that they can focus
on developing their business and increasing customer loyalty.
As these trends strengthen, we’ll continue to see UC play a bigger role in SMBs. In fact, by 2018, I predict up to 65% of SMBs will have added or replaced existing systems with UC. It will be years before we see complete adoption, but in the near term UC will move from objective to reality as organizations progressively embrace the technology. No one talks about desktop or landline adoption anymore – and that’s the direction UC is heading. ●
to re-con gure rewall rules and implement routing changes.
Similar to bursting, blue/green operations refers to load sharing between two clouds, which is useful for testing new applications or version in a controlled setting. It demands automated network recon gurations as applications move from dev/test into production. e merger of NFV and DevOps gives enterprises using blue/green a telecom- proven approach to achieve this.
Enterprises bene ting from the union
of NFV and DevOps in 2017 will look to standards-based orchestration to get them there, just like telecoms have with standards like TOSCA and open source orchestrators like Cloudify.
Enterprises likely will want just one NFV orchestration manager, one that supports application deployment across multiple clouds (from VMware to OpenStack) as well as multiple data centers and availability zones.
e lessons of NFV and DevOps are moving from telecoms to the enterprise in the year ahead. By this time next year, it will no longer be “the road less traveled,” but rather a well-marked path for enterprises embracing DevOps and hybrid cloud. Choosing this path will make all the di erence, and you want to choose it before your competitors do. ●
3 Reasons SMBs Are
TELECOM RESELLER .COM
Going All in on UC
he uni ed communications (UC) SUBSCRIPTIONS & CIRCULATION market is booming as organizations of
UC&C market is on the upswing,” revealing that 41% of respondents planned to implement UC in the next two years. And what’s not to love? Mobile features and chat align well with new ways of working and enable faster collaboration and exibility.
A survey from Jabra found even stronger interest among SMBs. e ndings revealed that up to two-thirds of SMBs will either add UC or replace existing systems with UC in the next one to two years. UC has been around for several years, so why now?
I see three drivers for this move to mass adoption: the rise of cloud computing, the increasing importance of digital to SMBs, and the need to become more competitive and productive.
1) THE RISE OF CLOUD COMPUTING
It’s no surprise that SMBs are jumping on- board with UC quickly. ere are a number of factors that are contributing to the technology’s adoption. One of the biggest technical drivers is the rise of cloud computing. In the last
year, I have seen a tremendous increase in the adoption of hosted voice and voice-as-a-service models. With the cloud, SMBs are no longer constrained by space or on-site support. It’s no
DUPUIS
by Yves Dupuis, SVP Global Enterprise Solutions at Jabra (www.jabra.com)
wonder that three-quarters of SMBs are bee ng up their cloud budgets.
2) DIGITAL TAKES A FRONT SEAT
More broadly, digital has come to the forefront for SMBs with approximately a third of SMBs noting half of revenue stems from digital sales. As more small businesses work and live online, they are being pushed to get “up to speed” on all things digital – including communication and collaboration.
e consumerization of digital voice communication by brands such as Skype deepens the familiarity and comfort level SMBs
I have seen a tremendous increase in the adoption of hosted voice and voice-as-a service models.
to “follow the app” through its lifecycle, automatically and dynamically con guring network services to facilitate application development, testing and scaling.
A simple example of this can be seen in
the initial deployment of an application to a private cloud. at application is likely to need network changes like con guration of security groups, changing rewall rules, installing and con guring load balancers, DNS operations and IPAM management.
Open source tools like Cloudify provide all the NFV orchestration needed to support this deployment in a DevOps setting, automating installation and deployment, monitoring of KPIs, and auto-healing and auto-scaling based on those KPIs.
at’s a reasonable example to illustrate
how NFV and DevOps are already uniting for telecoms. Now, let’s consider a more complex— and more likely—scenario that we’ll see more and more of in 2017: hybrid cloud NFV for large enterprises.
As enterprises increasingly adopt hybrid cloud in the year ahead, they face a new level of network operations complexity. NFV and DevOps o er compelling bene ts for scenarios like bursting, where the network must be automatically and dynamically recon gured to adjust load balancing and tra c steering and
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all sizes look to streamline operations
NFV and DevOps Converging to Bring Telecom Lessons to
Athe Enterprise
merican poet Robert Frost began “ e Road Not Taken” with “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood.”
But when looking at the quickening pace
of transformation in NFV, it might be more appropriate for us to talk about how the two roads of NFV and DevOps are beginning to converge.
Forgive the lyrical mashup, but there
is something poetic happening as the technologies and business models that underpin network virtualization mature.
In the year ahead, we’re going to see the convergence of NFV and DevOps—developed by telecoms—making its move into enterprises. is “Enterprise NFV” shi will bene t enterprise operators of large, global networks and hybrid cloud deployments.
Telecoms like AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, Telefonica, and China Mobile embraced NFV in 2016, driven by the maturity of open source projects like OPNFV, Cloudify, ARIA, Open-O,
SHALOM
by Nati Shalom, CTO of GigaSpaces (www.gigaspaces. com)
OpenStack, and Kubernetes. At the same time, the business models for VNFs are beginning to modernize, adapting to t modern, scale-out design principles.
e result of these shi s is that enterprise operators of big networks are beginning to pay attention to what service providers have achieved with NFV.
is enterprise NFV shi allows for network management and orchestration services to become an integrated part of the application design and deployment process—DevOps. In essence, Enterprise NFV allows the network