OK, let's say you're a CIO who's promoted hybrid cloud computing in your company. Then along came all these news stories that call into question the whole notion of cloud economies. Do you send some covert IT team to block the news from the CFO's computer, or do you deal with it? Hopefully, the latter.

I've examined audits of over four-dozen cloud projects, and the good news is that most cloud applications make the business case. The bad news is that a lot, a worrisome lot, don’t. If you want yours to succeed, there are some strategies that will help, in the form of five “forgets” and four “remembers”.

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If you’re an enterprise CIO, CFO, or network operations type, you’ve probably been reading about how this service provider or that cloud provider have saved up to 50% on network equipment by using generic “white-box” technology instead of proprietary routers and switches.  It’s hard not to wonder whether your own network budget could buy twice as much gear, and what projects might now meet their business case.  Could enterprises get in on the white-box revolution?  Maybe, if they can address the issues that even service providers and cloud providers have already faced, and in some cases been bitten by.

Compatibility

The first issue is finding the hardware and software. White-box hardware needs software, either an all-inclusive “network operating system” that provides all the features you need, or an operating system plus a separate routing/switching package. The software can’t just be shoveled onto something and run; it has to match the hardware.  In some cases, the matching process is facilitated through the same sort of drivers found on PCs and servers, but not all hardware has a driver suitable for all software.  Pick a white box and you may not find software you like for it. Pick software you like, and no white box you like may fully support it. This is why self-integration of white-box hardware and software is something enterprises should avoid at all costs.

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Who, in the entire IT space, wouldn’t like to see an uptick in tech spending?  Enterprises would see new purchases easier to make, vendors would make more money, and technologists in general would have a new sense of excitement and mission.  It seems like we’ve been stuck in a do-more-for-less rut, but the past offers us some evidence of how we could get out of it.

If you were to plot of the growth in enterprise IT spending versus GDP growth for the US over the entire life of information technology, you’d see not a hockey stick but a series of peaks and valleys.  You would see that there are three clear periods or cycles where IT spending has significantly outstripped GDP growth, and that we’ve been in a trough ever since the last one ended in about 2000.  We’ve never had two decades pass without another cycle, so what’s wrong?  Answer: Nothing’s driving one now.

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Sometimes it’s hard to see gradual changes in technology paradigms because they’re gradual.  Sometimes it helps to play “Just suppose…” and see where it leads. So, just suppose that the cloud did what some radical thinkers say, and “absorbed the network”. That’s sure an exciting tag line, but is this even possible, and how might it come about?

Companies are already committed to a virtual form of networking for their WAN services, based on VPNs or SD-WAN, rather than building their own WANs from pipes and routers.  That was a big step, so what could be happening to make WANs even more virtual, to the point where the cloud could subsume them?  It would have to be a data-center change.

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I can’t tell you how many times one of my clients or contacts has complained about the difficulties associated with getting network-budget approval. If I’d never met a CFO in person, the description these people gave me would have led me to expect something like a troll or a zombie, bent on eating projects and maybe people, too. Do we wear garlic when we visit the CFO, or maybe do a chant before the meeting, or might there be a more practical approach?

CFOs aren’t just trying to mess up a good technology project (at least most of the time), they’re trying to validate two basic financial rules that govern technology procurements.  Rule One is that any project must advance a company’s financial position and not hurt it. That seems logical, but it’s often difficult to assess just what the return on investment (ROI) of any project is.  Rule Two is that you don’t want to buy equipment that you’ll have to replace before it’s been fully depreciated. The useful life of something should be at least as long as the financial life as set by tax laws.

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OK, help me understand this. Microsoft just spent almost $20 billion to buy Nuance, the company that supplies the popular Dragon speech-to-text tool. Microsoft already has speech-to-text available in Windows 10 and through Azure, and even a partnership with Nuance. Nuance’s single big jump in stock price in its history coincides with Covid and WFH, which is now (hopefully) passing. Nuance revenue boom? Apparently, ending. The Dragon product? Incremental to Microsoft’s current position. Health care vertical? Interesting, but not a cash cow.

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If you stop and think, a lot of our expectations about network services are really about personality—our own.  We’d like our services to work, well, the way we work.  We’d like them to know us, to tune to our needs, right?  Do you think that some giant global interconnect with hundreds of thousands of elements is going to be able to do that?  Nope, which means personalized services will have to come down to the only piece we really own—the lowly network edge.

We learned decades ago that you can’t make giant networks user- or service-aware.  Awareness of this sort, which is known as “statefulness” in network-speak, means sticking little pieces of a virtual-you into the network to represent your interests. Maybe these pieces are an entry in a routing table, or maybe they’re a policy stored in some repository and sent to the devices that handle your traffic, but they’re individualized if what they’re doing is to personalize.  That just doesn’t scale.  Not only are there too many little pieces, network traffic could get reconfigured or a device could fail, and all at once your personalizing pieces aren’t even where your traffic is going.

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