Article

Brandon Ross' 2003 predictions

Brandon Ross
We asked our site experts to give us their industry predictions for the New Year. Here's what intelligent routing expert Brandon Ross had to say:
Brandon Ross

In 2003 the major concerns for businesses will be to:

  • Reduce operational costs. Operational costs are a major item in today's IT budgets. In order to support new IT investment in a climate of flat or slowly growing overall IT spending, customers are struggling to figure out how to reduce operational costs.
  • Increase availability and improve disaster recovery plans. Businesses are also keenly aware of the importance of disaster recovery and the need to maximize availability. Events like 9/11 and major network outages like the WorldCom/UUNet outage of October 3rd clearly illustrate why this is important.

Companies addressing these concerns will drive the following technologies:

  • Multihoming (where companies purchase connectivity from more than one network provider) is critical for companies that want to reduce their exposure

    Requires Free Membership to View

    Login

  • to a single service provider. Multihoming is on the rise (growing over 20% in the last 12 months) and over 8000 companies are now multihomed.
  • To reduce operational costs, customers will look to network and system management systems that allow for "management by exception." These systems not only diagnose and report on problems, but also fix problems without requiring constant IT staff intervention. These capabilities are key to operational cost and complexity reduction. An emerging technology called route optimization provides this capability. Uniquely combining the best characteristics of performance monitoring, routing and network management, route optimization offers a new paradigm for how to manage IT infrastructures.

2003 will bring a growing adoption of multihoming and route optimization as companies see the huge value of "management by exception." Over the next three years, this paradigm will not only make multihomed locations efficient, but will extend across the entire enterprise network.

>>Visit Brandon's Ask the Expert section


Join the conversationComment

Share
Comments

    Results

    Contribute to the conversation

    All fields are required. Comments will appear at the bottom of the article.
    Back to top