Network

The future of enterprise networking is no more networks

At Burton Group’s Catalyst Conference, I chatted briefly with speaker Matt Lavallee about how the conference was going, and he asked me this question: “Have there been any surprises for you?”

In short, my answer was “yes.” But in long, if the title of this blog post is any indication, I was quite taken aback by what I heard from Burton Group senior analyst David Passmore in his first session on the “wireless everything” era.

When I spoke to Passmore last week in an interview on computer networking trends for 2009, I hadn’t quite realized that his future of networks meant the extinction of them.

In the first point of our interview Passmore stated, “Wireless is one [networking trend of ‘09] because there’s an increased use of mobile phones for both data as well as for voice. We’re also seeing enterprises using wireless LANs (WLANs) often as a substitute for wired Ethernet.” From these trends, he suggested that we would some day no longer need networks.

Consider this tongue-in-cheek dialogue between Passmore’s explanation of this at Catalyst and the audience’s reaction:

Passmore: For longer-term networking trends, we may actually see the disappearance of enterprise networks.

Audience: Blank, saucer-eyed staring

Passmore: You’re probably thinking, “How can that be?”

Audience: Those not nodding vehemently to his question are doing so internally, thinking “Yes, how can that be?”

Passmore: Well, we’re already seeing a shift from wired Ethernet access for the use of wireless LANs.

Audience: OK, but that’s still a network — hence the “n” in wireless “LAN”…

All kidding aside — what he meant was that Ethernet is very surely being replaced with wireless, which will then be replaced by 4G mobile cellular data. Does this seem probable? I think he has a valid point, but how soon will a transition like this occur? Will the network engineer have to move into wireless telecommunications in his lifetime? Who’s to say?

Google can hear you now

A college professor once warned me never to put things in writing — which was funny given that he was a writing professor. What he meant was that to ensure confidentiality between people I communicated with remotely, I should speak with them over the phone. That way, he said, it would be much harder for a person to publicize or look back on anything said. Arguably, phone call privacy isn’t guaranteed, but between a hand-written note, an email, an IM conversation or a phone call, the audible record was the most anonymous. Google’s recent acquisition of GrandCentral Communications, however, makes phone call privacy much less likely.

As consumer-centric as Google initially set out to be, they just keep either building new useful enterprise applications or acquiring companies that do. This acquisition is a prime example; GrandCentral Communications “provides services for managing your voice communications,” according to Google’s blog entry.

GrandCentral’s pitch is this: “No matter how often you move, change jobs or phone providers, everyone can still reach you through the same phone number.” And the business advantage can be seen in that this technology would give enterprise workers more flexibility: If you miss a meeting or a call, you can listen to it through someone’s forwarded email. When you discuss ideas with your boss you’ll never have to take notes again or run the risk of forgetting an assignment.

But this advantage also comes at the price of having to pay much more attention to the words coming out of your mouth. Editing what you say can only happen inside your head. Once it’s out, it’s there to be heard — and recorded, and posted to a blog and turned into a techno song by Indaba Music users.

Yes, with GrandCentral.com a conversation can go from phone to public forum within clicks. They keep your phone call records in their database and you can forward them to your colleagues, post them to a blog and more. So unless you’re talking to someone in person, any mode of communication through a device may as well be a record of your intercourse.

Let’s not get forget the impact this has on server space and network bandwidth. As the network remains the central core that enables connections and communications, the converged network which carries voice and video traffic across IP networks, is all the more demanding. Some months ago, Cisco’s push for network convergence was said to broaden the role of network pros. But with corporate kings like Google vying for more enterprise voice and video, this is only the beginning of what networking professionals will have to deal with.

Now that workers can easily manage their voice accounts, you may be wondering who is helping network pros manage the voice data on their network. SearchNetworking.com created a workshop on how to manage voice performance on your network, dedicated to this very cause. And if there are any other management tools you’re looking for, let us help you find them and get organized.

On a side note about getting organized, GrandCentral’s FAQ section says “Google acquired GrandCentral because its communications services fit into Google’s mission to organize the world’s information.” That was “to organize the world’s information.” At least you don’t have that responsibility.

And for Google, who does have that mission, thank you for helping me find, through your search engine, these articles on ways you frighten the general public:

• From ABC News: Is Google Turning Into Big Brother?
• From Bill Snyder’s “Tech’s Bottom Line” blog: Google plays Big Brother
• From CSMonitor.com: Big brother isn’t watching - Google is

And believe it or not, there’s an entire website devoted to the topic: Google as Big Brother.

Thanks for reading, watching, and hearing…

Riverbed gets Mazu Networks for a bargain

WAN optimization heavyweight Riverbed Technology gobbled up Mazu Networks this week for just $25 million in cash. Mazu is a privately held company that sells network behavior analysis (NBA) tools that analyze the interaction between users, applications and systems. Mazu Profiler, the company’s flagship product, is used for security monitoring, but like many NBA vendors, customers have been increasingly using it for monitoring and analyzing the performance of rich critical applications like voice and video.

Riverbed apparently is acquiring Mazu so that it can better evaluate the state of application performance over a customer’s wide area network. The comapny’s press release explains that Mazu’s ability to give “a holistic, real-time view of application usage and performance” is critical to understanding the “application environment and taking the right steps to validate and ensure delivery of business-critical applications across the wide area network.”

Riverbed’s cash payment of $25 million for Mazu is definitely a bargain. According to GigaOm, venture capitalists have invested $40 million into the company. The blog peHub puts the VC figure at $47 million. The VC firms might get their money back if Mazu performs for Riverbed. The terms of the sale include an additional payment of up to $22 million based on the sales performance of Mazu in the 12 months following the closing of the deal.

How network engineers can avoid the data center move blues

Just because we’re surrounded by bad news doesn’t mean we can’t turn our lemons into lemonade. That’s at least what network management software solution company Advanced Systems Group (ASG) has done (not to be confused with the ASG band). They found a way to help enterprise IT/network administrator’s avoid datacenter move blunders in a way more compelling than a white paper — they sang about it in their YouTube video: The Data Center Move Blues.

Because we all know, when a data center moves, the network can’t go down. “Oh you know it can’t go down,” wails ASG founder and band front man John Murphy on what appears to be a Martin Backpacker Guitar.

When relocation, deduplication and virtualization complicate the network enough to make IT engineers sing the blues, it’s good to know what not to do during the data center move process.

ASG suggests avoiding these bad boys:

• Bad move #1: The so-called professional help
• Bad move #2: The every-man-for-himself move
• Bad move #3: The do-it-yourself move

More importantly, don’t forget to plan a great deal with your data center team and reach across to the right people. Before making a move, you can’t afford not to plan for every risk, and disaster preparedness will help you stay up while everything else is down.

An IT industry stimulus bill? better than investing in Detroit’s dinosaurs

Seventy-five years ago millions of young men were out of work. The Great Depression was in full swing. The ruling powers, nervous that so many idle, impoverished young men might might destabilize society, created the Civilian Conservation Corps. This pseudo-military organization enlisted three million young men in forestry, flood control and construction projects that ultimately led to the creation of the country’s most prominent national and state parks. Many people today have no concept of how decimated the country’s forests and agricultural lands were back then. These men planted five billion trees, which in part were responsible for helping end the great Dust Bowl of the 1930s and revitalizing the country’s farmlands.

Today we face The Worst Economic Crisis Since The Great Depression. Is it time for another Corps? How about the Civilian Information Technology Corps?

The Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, a Washington, D.C., think tank, believes it’s a good idea. In a new 22-page position paper entitled The Digital Road to Recovery (PDF), the foundation says the federal government should invest $30 billion into the country’s “national information technology infrastructure.” By investing this money into upgrading the country’s broadband capabilities and the IT systems of the health care system and the national power grid, the country would create nearly one million new jobs while boosting productivity and innovation, according to the foundation. Not only will jobs be created to build this infrastructure, but the infrastructure itself will encourage the creation of new businesses and new jobs.

“Building out an IT-based network like broadband, health IT, or the smart power grid leads to new jobs generated upstream by investment in industries that create new and innovative applications and services to take advantage of the more robust IT network,” the paper reads.

Like the CCC and the WPA of the Depression, will there be a New IT Deal? Barack Obama is known to love his CrackBerry. No doubt he knows just how important such a targeted stimulus could be for the national economy. It should also resonate with those of you who raspberried my post about how a good network engineer is hard to find.

Forget cutting to the bone. Can you cut through the bone, too?

Hey, have you heard that the economy is in bad shape? It’s bad out there. Just ask the newest Nobel Laureate for economics, Paul Krugman:

Seriously, we are in very deep trouble. Getting out of this will require a lot of creativity, and maybe some luck too.

Well you should know that analysts and vendors are lining up to give networking pros advice on how to save money in 2009.

Today I received an invitation from Enterprise Management Associates for a January webinar entitled How to Reduce Network Management Expenses in 2009. EMA vice president Dennis Drogseth will examine how automation and an integrated life cycle approach to network management can reduce costs.

Network Instruments sent us a list of the “Top five ways you can be network hero in 2009.

• Harness the information you have. Network devices have tons of metrics that can provide cheap visibility into your infrastructure. For instance, if you aren’t doing this already, start collecting NetFlow data and aggregate it into some kind of analyzer to get real time stats on you applications.

• Test, test, test. It’s easier to identify and budget for changes to applications before you launch them rather than after. Understand how your apps will run on the systems provided and the network provided before you allow the application team to launch them.

• Prioritizing critical traffic. Instead of spending money to boost bandwidth, set quality of service thresholds for critical apps and allow bandwidth-hogging apps that aren’t as critical wait a little longer.

• Stop throwing bandwidth. Slow application performance isn’t always a network issue. Bring some donuts over to the systems guys and ask them to check on how their servers are performing. Maybe they aren’t configured properly for the applications they are running.

• Anticipate rather than react. Network managers are often in reaction mode, using analysis tools after the network has a problem. Too often they’re waiting for the problem to recur. If you run your tools continuously you can spot network issues before the user experiences them. You’ll spend less time trying to diagnose and fix them. And you’ll have more time to get everything else done.

Info-Tech Research Group has also published a list of Eight Ways to Slash Network and Telecom Costs by Half. I won’t publish them in full since Info-Tech would rather that you spend $195 to get the list from them, but here are a few brief examples of things you can do:

• Buy used networking gear. This market has grown quite a bit over the last few years. Your vendors might not be happy with you for doing this, but they don’t need to know. I plan to write about this next month on SearchNetworking.com.
• Renegotiate telecom and mobile service contracts. If you are in a position to do it, now is a good time to get a better deal from your providers. They’ll be wiling to lower their charges in order to keep your business in these dark times.
• Get rid of T1 lines on your WAN. There are lots of cheaper alternatives out there. See if you can find something that meets your requirements at a lower price.

Trapeze not flying high over Magic Quadrant

Every year Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for wireless LAN infrastructure has some winners and some losers. One or two vendors will emerge from the crowded quadrant of niche players to become a market leader, a visionary or a challenger. And one or two other vendors will slip back into the crowd of niche players. This year, one of the vendors who came out on the losing end is accusing Gartner of having, at the very least, an appearance of a conflict of interest.

Brian Johnson, director of public relations for Trapeze Networks, called me last week and implied that Meru Networks is receiving favorable coverage from Gartner over Trapeze. Gartner placed Meru in the visionary quadrant for the second year in a row, while Trapeze slipped from visionary status to niche player.

Johnson revealed to me that Tim Zimmerman, one of the Gartner analysts who wrote this year’s Magic Quadrant, is a former employee of Meru Networks. I checked around and indeed Zimmerman was director of industry marketing for Meru Networks from Octbor 2007 to January 2008. Johnson also pointed out that Gartner’s former research director for wireless LAN technology, Rachna Ahlawat, is currently the vice president of strategic marketing for Meru.

Johnson explained that Trapeze has had a good year and is a superior company to Meru. He said it “stretches the imagination” that Meru could be ranked higher than his comapny.

“We have a higher market share than Meru,” Johnson said. “We have more OEM relationships. And we are a public company with a large bankroll behind us while Meru is a private company that is rapidly burning through its cash… In terms of ability to execute, I think that Trapeze has a higher ability to execute than Meru can.”

Johnson also told me that Trapeze brought eight products to market this year and three of them won awards (I looked through a list of press releases on Trapeze’s website and didn’t see that many product releases, but perhaps I missed a few). He also pointed out that Trapeze won the largest wireless LAN deployment in the world this year when it closed a deal with the University of Minnesota.

Johnson was reacting to a story about the Magic Quadrant which I wrote last week. When I talked to Mike King, Zimmerman’s coauthor, for that story, he told me that Trapeze’s downgrade was reflective of its relative silence on the market since it was acquired by Belden over the summer. He suggested that things have slowed down at Trapeze while Belden goes through the process of absorbing it. And he predicted that Trapeze could lose some key OEM partners when its deals with those expire in a few months. All this can be fairly typical for mergers and acquisitions. Motorola experienced a similar decline on the Magic Quadrant when it bought Symbol Technologies, but it has since rebounded and is now identified as a market leader by Gartner.

Now any industry veteran will tell you that analysts take jobs with vendors all the time and research firms like Gartner commonly hire analysts from the vendors they cover. Ahlawat left Gartner for Meru in June of 2007 so it’s been well over a year since she’s had any relationship with the firm. However, Zimmerman left Meru less than a year ago, so it was worth my talking to Gartner about this issue.

First I talked to Andrew Spender, Gartner’s vice president of corporate communications. He said Gartner employs a variety of measures to ensure that its analysts are independent and objective.

“First we have our principals of ethical conduct and our code of conduct which all our analysts sign up to as soon as they join the company,” he said. “They have very intensive training in what that code of conduct means and how they need to adhere to it. It’s very specific in terms of accountability.”

Spender also said that no piece of Gartner research is ever the work of one single analyst.

“When you buy a piece of research or become a Gartner client, you obtain the research from Gartner, not from an individual analyst. Each piece of research is peer reviewed. Our community of 650 analysts have a formal obligation to do peer reviews of other analysts’ research to ensure that any kinds of inconsistencies, any errors of data collection or any errors of conclusions are challenged and corrected before the research sees the light of day.”

I also spoke to Larry Perlstein, Gartner’s ombudsman (Gartner is the only analyst firm I know of that employees ombudsmen), about this matter. He has already conducted an investigation of Trapeze’s complaint.

“Basically I didn’t find anything that made me concerned that there was any real fact in Trapeze’s issues. The analyst that they expressed a special worry about, who was formerly at Meru, was there for only a very short period of time, about three months. It wasn’t clear that anything in that involvement was going to dramatically influence this particular piece of research. Most of our analysts come from vendors. As part of our hiring process we try to ensure that people have the capacity and potential to be balanced and objective.”

On the same day that I spoke to Johnson at Trapeze about this issue, I happened to chat with David Callisch, vice president of marketing at Ruckus Networks. Ruckus is another niche player in this year’s Quadrant, ranked a little lower than Trapeze.

“Tim Zimmerman and Mike King are both very stand up guys,” Callisch said. “I thought we had a pretty mediocre spot on the Quadrant, but to be quite objective, who are we to say? Vendors always think they deserve a better spot… But Tim and Mike did a lot of due diligence. I think they did a good job even if we got a lousy spot.”

He said that Gartner placed Meru high probably because the firm likes the innovative single channel approach Meru takes with its access points, which solves voice roaming very well. He said he has doubts about whether this approach can scale as well as more mainstream wireless LAN technologies, but he doesn’t fault Gartner for giving Meru high marks for their technology.

Callisch went on to call out Trapeze for its acquisition by Belden. He said Trapeze has a very good product line, but it had marketed its technology poorly, driving down the value of the company.

“They ended up being sold to Belden for pennies on the dollar and that hurt the valuation of other [wireless LAN] companies” he said.

Gartner’s WLAN Magic Quadrant: Motorla, HP and Siemens on the rise

Where once there were two, now there are three.

Gartner has published its 2008 Magic Quadrant for the wireless LAN infrastructure market. The most noteworthy change from 2007’s Quadrant is the rise of Motorola. Last year Gartner identified Cisco and Aruba as the two leaders in a crowded market. This year, Motorola has joined them as a third market leader.

HP ProcCurve (which purchased Colubris this year) and the newly merged Enterasys/Siemens Enterprise Communications both advanced from niche player status to visionaries. Trapeze Networks appears to have taken a step backwards since it was acquired by Belden, slipping from visionary to niche player.

Meru Networks remains in the visionary quadrant, although it is on the cusp of climbing into market leader status.

To see more in-depth analysis of this research, check SearchNetworking.com on Tuesday, Dec. 9.

Cisco tightens their belt while Aruba sharpens the ax

The notoriously frugal Cisco is tightening their belts a little tighter, more or less shutting their offices over the holidays and freezing hiring for a bit. They hope to save $2 billion, which isn’t small change even for the world’s largest networking equipment provider.

They also are looking to cut travel expenses, and since Cisco insiders tell us everyone at the company flies coach to begin with, we guess that means more TelePresence. Layoffs, however, are not planned, at least for now, according to Dow Jones Newswires:

Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO) doesn’t have any layoffs planned at this point, according to Chairman and Chief Executive John Chambers. …

Chambers, speaking to analysts at a conference hosted by Credit Suisse, said that if the company was to have layoffs, it would be a one-time event, rather than a string of events.

Sounds like he’s hedging his bets, just in case, but it might be tough to cut the fat from Cisco’s already lean (for a company of their size) operation.

Aruba isn’t so optimistic. The company announced they will be cutting jobs to reduce operating costs by 10%, though the exact number getting laid off is unknown.

This is despite Aruba’s record revenues last quarter, which, according to Farpoint Group’s Craig Matthias, came at a price:

“If you look at Aruba’s margins, they have eroded some, and obviously discounting is a heavy element in winning deals,” Mathias said. “So I’m expecting that their margins probably won’t improve much with their sales. But this is an industry that will continue to grow, and it will accelerate into the future.”

It also calls into question what wireless vendors keep whispering to me: Their equipment — and business prospects — are counter-cyclical. The theory goes that wireless is a great way to cut costs: No more having to futz around to rewire desk connections, less physical wiring to lay down, etc. etc. But with such a crowded field of vendors, even the winners might have a tough time staying or getting profitable.

Further Reading:

• IT economic outlook: Not so good
• Aruba to Customers: Get 200% more WLAN bandwidth, free!: Aruba in more charitable times … a month ago.
• Overheard: How to keep your IT job during a recession

What’s 007 in binary?

If you ever find your networking career a little too pedestrian, always know that your IT skills can land you a much more exciting gig if you’re willing to take the risk:

Ali Ashtari, 43, a computer and hi-tech equipment buyer for Iran’s defence industry and nuclear programme, was hanged after admitting he worked for Israel. It is the first known conviction of an alleged Israeli agent in Iran for almost 10 years. …

Behind their backs he allowed the software he bought to be subtly doctored by Israeli computer engineers before it was imported to Iran. Ashtari confessed: “Mossad’s goal was to sell specialised computer equipment through me to Iranian intelligence organisations.”

The case echoes the FBI’s warning not too long ago about Cisco knockoffs as potential Trojan horses, but this time, the threat was apparently real — or at least real enough for Iran to take action.

Corporate espionage is a very real threat, as Intel found out recently, but people aren’t generally executed for it.

As for me? I’ll stick with the IT spying antics of Chuck — a little less realistic, perhaps, but fewer people end up getting killed. In this clip, Chuck and company use social engineering techniques — one of network security’s weakest points — to infiltrate the opposition.

Further Reading:

• IT expert executed in Iran: More commentary at Zero Day.
• SearchNetworking.com’s Security homepage: For all your security needs.
• OSI: Securing the Stack, Layer 8 — Social engineering and security policy: More on social engineering security from our all-in-one guide.