Growth of the network management space will be driven by what the enterprise can provide, but also by what customers, communities, and employees want. The key factor that will drive growth is change in enhanced user experience in terms of mobility, points of access, universal identity, and availability.

The trend right now is a shift from box integration to process excellence, management and convergence. Today, enterprises look at IT as a service and not as an internal support function. Customers have reworked their IT strategy by investigating changes in their business requirements, selecting the right technology, and implementing changes in a planned/controlled manner.

This is a growing industry and India is certainly taking the lead. Outsourcing network management to another company has its pros and cons. For smaller companies lacking IT resources and expertise, it is certainly an attractive offer. But for companies where network continuity is critical, there may be a trade-off.

There are many different trends in the network management systems: simple scalability, integration at various levels, supporting higher network abstractions, supporting network in a box, multi-vendor devices, etc.

With heavy investments being put up in data centers, NOCs, and delivery centers, managed service providers are gearing up to be able to proactively manage large network systems.

Standardization results in economies of scale and better returns for every dollar invested. There is a huge domestic demand to tie up all connectivity, management and people processes to a single board with well laid out correlations and controls.

SPs (service providers) will offer value-added services like network management via dashboards. Through these portals, the enterprise IT staff will have customized views of network status and device details.

A slew of new management products for enterprise networks have hit the market in the recent months. It's usually good to have more choices, but with the increasing choices, decision-making can become more complex.

One option, which few customers are showing interest in, is outsourcing managed network services. Thought process is to hand off daily management of network devices to network insight and utilize their IT staff for more strategic initiatives. But Indian companies are slow to latch on to the concept of outsourcing due to key concerns like giving up control, confidentiality, reliability, technical expertise, etc.

The other option is consolidating their management software into one central location, making it network operations center by which they would have complete visibility in their network-from NOC activities like add moves and changes to all the devices which are part of their corporate network.

Network management is no longer limited to just transport or maintenance, but has graduated to network applications being managed for customer organizations. Applications such as hosted mail, shared mail and other hosted and shared applications are already becoming a part of network management. As this is likely to increase the scope of work for the existing service providers, we expect to see an overlap in services provided by different IT and telecom vendors in the future.

Network management services have grown from their role of providing basic uptime services to an integrated service with more focus on application response management. It helps analyze information to optimize network performance, detect problems in real time, diagnose problems and analyze the traffic in the network. At times it also helps in identifying protocol- or application-specific traffic.

Its ability to discover complete networks automatically, capture and store device-specific information and set thresholds to detect errors or abnormal behaviors has made it a must-have for any organization targeting smooth IT functioning.

There has been an increased intolerance among enterprises toward downtimes and IT failures. Instead of reacting to a problem, their focus remains on proactively addressing networking needs, leading to increased demand for NMS. Thus, apart from base level uptime service for the network and bandwidth management optimization, enterprises are now looking for integrated performance management and application response time services so that the applications are available at a predictable and consistent manner.

NMS is moving from pure play network uptime to integrated service delivery. Organizations are looking toward correlating between different towers of the IT setup and trying to actualize the application availability. Application response time is driving the game. With infrastructure getting more robust, the trend has shifted from network and linkup time to application response time. People are also looking at services management rather than pure play network management.

A major wave of IT investments has begun across banks, financial services institutions, telecom, manufacturing, government and education, IDC said in its report on “India Domestic IT Market Top 10 Predictions for 2007”. This is, probably, why India registered the fastest growth when it came to IT spending in 2006 with a 22.4% upswing and is forecasted to hold this position in 2007 with a 21.5% growth to reach Rs 75,891 crore.

Network management services will be driven by customers who wish to focus on their core competence areas and let service providers manage the entire IT infrastructure. It helps the organization to stay alert and respond promptly to market opportunities.

The growing number of applications, users, locations, and different user access technologies, etc has increased the complexities of enterprise networks manifolds. Therefore, a solution is required which is able to cover all assets, processes, and people under a single platform and manage them in a cohesive manner from a dashboard.

New Technologies
Intelligent network fault analysis algorithms are aimed at getting to the root cause of the problem rather than simple trap-based flagging systems. For instance, if an aggregation router is faltering, it might raise millions of alerts. Rectifying these alerts will result in large losses in terms of time and money.

Technologies like MPLS over Ethernet have the potential to completely redefine network flow and carriage patterns.

Solutions based on Netflow or IPFIX, IP SLAs and those based on appliance-based instrumentation of the network will gain increasing acceptance, so as to seek deeper insight into network performance and, thereby, management.

Network management is clearly heading toward highly integrated management solution sets with an emphasis on proactive rather than reactive which would enable customers to deploy and manage networks based on policies and also move toward 'on-demand computing'. However, no vendor has a comprehensive solution to manage large heterogeneous networks.

Network management is going to be an essential foundation on which practically all the future business automation efforts are likely to rest. One most important thing to note is that one cannot have one NMS to manage all multi-vendor devices in the network. Hence, few venders are working on abstract layer between network and the management platform, with this the NMS will override or reside on the top of the abstract layer; this layer would have the complete visibility of all the devices/servers in the network.

Budget Constraints
Budgetary constraints and competitive pressures have forced the industry to drive down costs. Enterprises ask for lower management costs. The concept of end-to-end solutions or one-stop solutions has gained momentum. Enterprises don't have to spend money on different vendors. Also, bandwidth prices have come down considerably, and device functionalities are increasing disproportionately to price. However, the cost of resources and expertise is rapidly rising, as is the trend in other related industries too.

Implementation of tools like NMS, help desk systems and other management applications is still very complex and expensive. The market will be able to use these complex infrastructures to serve their IT objectives. This converts the entire engagement process into a lucid, opex model without having the risk of failed installations, vendor lock-ins, obsolescence, etc.

Project implementation costs will be a challenge to manage, especially keeping in mind the need for talented and trained manpower, both within enterprises and system integrators.

Network management means different things to different people. In some cases, it involves a solitary network consultant monitoring network activity with an outdated protocol analyzer.

In other cases, network management involves a distributed database, auto polling of network devices, and high-end workstations generating real-time graphical views of network topology changes and traffic. In general, network management is a service that employs a variety of tools, applications and devices to assist human network managers in monitoring and maintaining networks. So, the implementation cost depends on the complexity of the project.

Enterprises Want More
Today, enterprise networks are a mix of various service providers using different communication media for data connectivity. Customers look out for a single vendor contract that is able to liaison with numerous providers in a single SLA framework.

Customers also expect service providers to provide consultancy on best practices followed in change management, migration, system testing, certifications, etc.

Hardware network components, nowadays, are considered more of a service parameter, which needs to be proactively monitored and managed. Enterprises want solutions that help address service degradation issues while delivering enterprise applications over the IT infrastructure with root cause analysis.

Over the years, we have seen tremendous expansion in the area of network deployment. As companies realized the cost benefits and productivity gains created by network technology, they began to add networks and expand existing networks almost as rapidly as new network technologies and products were introduced. Certain companies were experiencing growing pains from deploying many different (and sometimes incompatible) network technologies.

The problems associated with network expansion affect both day-to-day network operation management and strategic network growth planning. Each new network technology requires its own set of experts.

The staffing requirements for managing large, heterogeneous networks created crisis for many organizations. An urgent need arose for automated network management (including what is typically called network capacity planning) integrated across diverse environments. Major concerns for most large companies are how they can manage their heterogeneous network, which consists of various products from multiple vendors.

Security and manageability have been major problem areas in network management. Enterprises face numerous challenges, including managing and controlling communication costs, building technical domain expertise along with retaining them and managing technological changes while protecting investments and providing continuum to the existing infrastructure.

As new technologies emerge and branches are added, the task of maintaining the networks becomes challenging. Shortage of staff also becomes a concern. The other big concern is how to keep pace with changing technology and going for the right solution/architecture which allows organizations to seemingly accommodate new technologies to meet future business requirements and also safeguard investments already made.

Enterprises prefer solutions that are easy to deploy, manage and use. They don't want solutions which become more of a problem to manage than the problem itself. Security and data centers are still considered to be risky among domestic customers. There are certain processes or information assets that enterprises are not willing to move out of their buildings.

To Improve Cost Efficiency
Network management solutions should help to optimize the usage of resource and help reduce response times of infrastructure, thus, lowering costs by avoiding unnecessary upgrades.

In the global market for outsourcing, we quickly need to move up the value chain and quality levels if we have to grow our market share at previous levels. Other countries may soon begin to match our cost levels and, frankly, it may be difficult to reduce costs beyond a certain limit. However, along with the first mover advantage, we also have the benefit of a well-established clientele, hence we believe it is the right moment to entrench ourselves as niche quality players.

Indian companies should be looking forward to be known for their quality, value addition and technical capabilities.

Effective knowledge management process, robust training framework, automation, strong project management capabilities, low transition period, and effective event management are some of the key points to improve quality and achieve cost efficiency.

It is generally beneficial for enterprises to enter into a pure process deal rather than a device or man-hour-based deal. If network management seemed like a headache that never seemed to go away, outsourcing management services may be just the right thing.

Hosting providers, systems integrators, network consultants, connectivity service providers, facilities management companies, and even telecom specialists are all getting into the act. They're investing heavily in infrastructure, systems, and connectivity for the control centers they call network operations centers (NOCs). Some players (like the ISP and data center businesses) are modifying existing infrastructure for management services.

Broadly, outsourcing management services can take place in two ways-on-site and remotely. For both these options, MSPs should comply with customer requirements with a custom built solution addressing various pain points of customers.

Networks that were set up 3-4 years ago were set up when options were limited-bandwidth availability options were only 64K or 2Meg and nothing in between. Now, with the advent of new technologies like MPLS and the influx of multiple service providers, organizations are attempting to derive the best out of these changes. Converged networks are also on the rise. Organizations are looking to leverage their existing infrastructure and investment by incorporating new technologies such as video and video transfers on existing networks.

Secondly, uptimes have ceased to become a significant concern for customers. With network infrastructure expected to support multiple applications, business users demand consistent and predictable response times for critical applications. Besides, organizations have started realizing that their bandwidth requirement during the peak periods of the month or the year is significantly different from the non-peak periods. The critical question for them is that can they subscribe to differentiated levels of service aligned to their business requirements.

Indian enterprises are increasingly realizing that managing networks is a high-maintenance, capital/resource-intensive endeavor fraught with risk. At the core of this challenge lies the fact that as applications get centralized/consolidated, access to them via the network makes it the most critical component of the IT Infrastructure piece. Thus, enterprise expectations from networks has moved up from basic connectivity and monitoring to an integrated and foolproof managed and secured setup.

Baburajan K
baburajank@cybermedia.co.in