Monetizing the Network with Integrated Cloud Services

Despite ever-increasing pressure to sell more, add new services and attract new customers, cloud service providers (CSPs) are generally overlooking at least one way to make more money and increase profitability. Regardless of whether we call it as SDN, Infrastructure-as-a-Service or Network-as-a- Service, the network should not be considered table stakes, as there is a golden opportunity to monetize the network.

There are several new technologies that are intended to make network connectivity, or basic routing and switching, more programmable, intelligent and controllable. This is important, but is largely about making a CSP more efficient. It is hard to sell efficiency as there is little value delivered to the end-user customer. Network services that enhance applications, on the other hand -- such as load balancing and WAN optimization, among others -- by nature are more valuable and therefore should not be given away.

In this presentation, John Vincenzo, vice president of marketing of Embrane, will discuss the needs of the enterprise and how CSPs should implement network virtualization in order to appropriately monetize the network. More specifically, he will talk to the need for dedicated services, which are typically only available through managed hosting services that don’t provide agility, rapid provisioning, elasticity programmability, etc., and how to get to a single extensible platform that can evolve with an enterprise’s needs from shared services to dedicated services. With new technologies, network services can be purchased at a variety of service tiers that can flexibly added to match the varying needs of enterprises.