Juniper Networks’ Vice President, Enterprise Marketing, Mike Bushong predicts that next year the cloud is going to be considered the “new normal” and it will be operations rather than services that will make it important.
Bushong said that one of the common misconceptions about cloud is that cloud is just “someone else’s servers”.
“It’s not the servers that make cloud offerings important; it’s the operations. To make operations really fly, architects have realized that they need to simplify and standardise. Bespoke infrastructure can’t exist for companies who truly want to optimize their operating environments. As this line of thinking becomes more prevalent, the first thing to go will be all the nerd knobs that make enterprise IT so complex”, he said.
Companies either born in the cloud or at the tail end of their digital transformation efforts will move first. Although this may create problems – if you are competing against a company that suddenly develops a meaningful digital advantage, the consequences can be dire. The industry is littered with the corpses of companies that lost to Amazon and other online retailers. Digital players have disrupted transportation, logistics, manufacturing…virtually every sector imaginable, Bushong said.
“Avoiding these pitfalls starts with people. A change in operations is a change in both skills and culture. Most companies won’t be able to hire an entire new staff, so it starts with one or two key hires with the requisite cloud-like skills to help lead the transformation. And that needs to be followed by a real focus on training people up, to open up a clear career path for them to build a foundation for the next decade”, Bushong said.
Next year supply chain diversification will become a priority for many companies and 2022 will see an architectural renaissance focused on how to reduce the risks that come with a concentrated set of suppliers.
Whether it’s multi-vendor networking to allow for diverse vendor choice, or the introduction of new components to create more supply optionality, the networking landscape will begin to evolve. And that evolution will necessarily start with the architectures that drive network choices, Bushong said.
In 2022, the network landscape will likely evolve at the pace of refresh. For companies that have been sitting on legacy equipment, natural upgrade cycles provide an opportunity to take a giant leap forward. New capacity build outs will drive opportunities to introduce new practices that bring in both new components and new vendors.
“But it’s hard to imagine getting through another generation of equipment without significant turnover of legacy architectures and the gear that supports them. This means we could see wholesale architectural shifts break over the next 3-5 years, and 2022 seems poised to be an inflection point”, Bushong said.
