The Brocade Network Subscription is claimed to be a significantly different business model from the way most enterprise customers acquire networking equipment today. Brocade essentially becomes a partner in sharing the business risk with prospective customers with the Brocade Network Subscription model. It is said to allow them to easily buy the exact amount of network infrastructure equipment they need to generate immediate business month-to-month, while delivering the flexibility to scale up and down as needed. This is claimed to be an enormously powerful benefit for customers in a dynamic business environment.
K P Unnikrishnan, APAC Marketing Director of Brocade Communications shares on the same with Var India.
In uncertain economic times, pay-per-use technology could be the answer to many efficiency and flexibility requirements of IT organisations.
Economic conditions over the last few years' have forced IT executives globally to sit up and take note of the southward bound budgets and northward bound costs. While hard times such as these encourage innovations, they also place a constraint on costs and investments, so the picture is still of a much tighter belt. The objective seems to be not only higher ROI with even smaller investments, but also maximizing value from installed infrastructure- to ensure growth at lower costs. Today, analysts are sure that even with a slow recovery, networking requirements will only head up, straight up. The same applies to the IT Network - a critical business enabler in most enterprises, helping management of supply and distribution chains and providing critical real time market and financial connections/information. Its criticality makes these costs very real and sometimes scary.
Network infrastructure technologies are keeping up with the business, but this will only add to the complications that IT managers are bound to face in the near future. The issues will center around the fact that technology domains are converging - what used to be watertight areas have fluid partitions today. Maintaining operability as well as security may be the bigger challenge this year, only second to the need to keep the lid on costs.
All these and more, have lead to the emergence and acceptance of the cloud and virtualization, which, in principle, allow economic as well as operational efficiency. The cloud allows almost limitless scalability and is very cost effective too. Enterprises also require flexibility of usage to allow for better alignment of their networking applications portfolio with their changing business needs, leading to higher efficiency at lower costs.
Cloud times
CIOs agree that, while the hero of the brat pack is still the cloud, the way it will be utilized through 2012, is very interesting. This makes the need for an efficient network infrastructure even more imperative. Driven by the cloud, IT executives will face much higher levels of network capacity growth. The need for additional flexibility and capacity, which was merely important in 2011, will become critical during the planning period through 2015. According to Analysts, by 2016, over half of workers globally will have abandoned their desktop computers in favour of remote devices like laptops, smartphones and tablets. Then, mobile application development projects targeting smartphones and tablets will outnumber native PC projects by a ratio of 4-to-1, the analysts predicts. Under such volumes of forecasted usage, peak loads could be the stuff of nightmares for IT managers.
The answer could well be a flexible, scalable network infrastructure. However, buying additional capability for every scale up is another nightmare - both in terms of budgets, and in terms of managing it. It is common knowledge that each organisation needs to draw out its own asset management strategy. That includes optimizing all its IT equipment. Moreover, as with any strategizing process, the biggest challenge is quantifying the requirements, both the obvious as well as the implied. Only then, a strategy that meets the requirements, and takes care of unforeseen eventualities, can be created. This is never an easy task since economic and business environments are never stable. With changing business requirements, IT portfolios need reviews, perhaps performed annually.
Flexibility Rules
To meet these challenges, CXOs identify flexibility as their key requirement for network equipment over a period. This will be among the most highly valued characteristics among enterprises. This allows them the freedom to align the IT enterprise with their business requirements at any time, assuring increased efficiency at lower costs.
The obvious answer to maintain this flexibility is not to invest in network as a capital purchase, but either lease or rent the service. For most IT organizations, it is a not a question of which acquisition method is "best"; it has to be a blend of the three models to deliver an adequate level of flexibility at an optimum cost - to choose between buy, rent or lease. On the ground, an optimal combination of owned, leased, and "short-term" networking asset acquisition models will be the most workable.
Brocade Network Subscription provides IT buyers with another option: the open-ended flexibility of a traditional rental contract coupled with a level of cost more typically associated with a leasing contract.
Brocade Network Subscription is an intelligent option for acquiring extra capacity for the company's network equipment that includes a full range of maintenance, services, and support with varying SLAs. So, rather than purchase or lease equipment, enterprise IT organizations now also have the option of acquiring network capacity on a long-term, open-ended rental model that offers the flexibility to increase or decrease capacity upon 30-60 days' notice. This allows IT organizations more flexibility to align network capacity with changing business needs and rapid provisioning to meet changing demands. This will come for a monthly subscription fees for the usage only. It also provides the flexibility of using other ports on owned or leased equipment that are not part of the subscription, or even with the organization's existing network environment - in other words, no rip and replace. The subscription helps organisations conserve capital while gaining greater flexibility to upgrade their network infrastructures to implement applications that allow them to stay ahead of competition.
The additional flexibility it provides can help any IT enterprise plan for expected market direction and acquisition models. Blurring the line between a product and a service offering, it enables organizations to acquire the right to use network equipment assets without purchasing them or entering into long-term leasing contracts- a viable third option for IT portfolio managers.
As far as Brocade is concerned, the best customer organisations are IaaS vendors - those who sell infrastructure as a service. They need to make huge investments in capital purchases before it can be leased. For smaller organisations with a limited capital budget, or with very dynamic requirements, or infrastructure service providers, Brocade Network Subscription is a perfect fit. However, network equipment buys are usually not very open to new value propositions, so the challenges that they may face also need to be discussed upfront, along with ways Brocade helps in mitigating them.
In most cases, the concept of flexibility versus efficiency is understood differently by IT enterprises and a Managed Service provider (like an IaaS provider). While IT enterprises value flexibility as a means to maintain efficiency in operations and business alignment, MSPs see it differently, as more of an investment. The messaging that Brocade provides here makes the concept acceptable, however.
Even internally in any organisation, while IT executives know the efficacy of a solution like the Brocade Subscription, the financial authorities want the purchase or acquisition to be justified by the ROI and the TCO. Since this is not a typical buying model, the economics needs to be worked out until the benefits are clearly visible.
With an effective asset management strategy in place, the benefits of the service far outweigh any initial doubts. The Brocade Networking subscription created a tremendous amount of industry stir when it was announced at the VMworld Las Vegas. Now after evaluations from various industry circles, the benefits if the services are surely finding their market - being an enormously powerful benefit for customers in a dynamic business environment.
