Time is now to put more WOW into your WAN

It is a bit ironic that as attendees at the FutureNet conference in Boston this week dined on Mexican fare as part of Cinco de Mayo festivities, just outside and within reach were gallons of hand sanitizer liquid. 

There were even small bottles of the stuff positioned at the registration desk, as people lined up to pick up their badges and dive into sessions that explored everything from building cost effective WANs to MPLS backhaul networks.  

The H1N1 swine flu was not officially on the agenda here as network engineers and technical specialists gathered to discuss the latest trends and developments in SIP trunking, telecom convergence and 4G mobile.  Nothing to sneeze at when it comes to keeping the corporate network up to snuff and preparing for such things as convergence, increasing numbers of teleworkers  and even the spread of green IT across distributed networks.

A lot of the first-day discussions focused on the evolution of WAN architectures, especially as companies explore emerging next generation Ethernet technologies, MPLS and VPLS alternatives.  Most enterprise architectures have extended way beyond the typical LAN, said Nemertes Research analyst Irwin Lazar in his presentation.  Companies do it because they have to, he noted, because if they do not the result can be a loss of customers, potential business and eventually market share. 

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