When I was a kid, I used to spend hours playing in the sandbox in our local park. But not everyone used to play nicely. The big kids wouldn’t talk to each other, while the little kids wouldn’t share their toys.

Sometimes the IT industry can feel a bit like that bad-tempered sandpit of old, with systems, standards, management tools and vendors all refusing to play nicely. But the time has come to change the rules; the time has come to put the customer experience first.

To unlock the full benefits of the application economy and digitalization, every component in the IT ecosystem – from physical hosts and virtual machines to controllers and orchestrators – needs to be able to play together nicely. And perform together flawlessly.

Bringing together disparate technologies is especially important within software-defined and virtualized environments, where their success is dependent on the pooling of multiple resources. Add a proprietary protocol or provisioning tool to the mix, and we’ll soon find ourselves sliding back to the very thing these flexible architectures promised to eliminate: vendor lock-in.

Open new doors         

This need for stronger collaboration in software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) ecosystems was highlighted at this year’s NFV World Congress. Dan Pitt, Executive Director of the Open Networking Foundation, talked about the need for greater ecosystem synergy, emphasizing that interoperability, innovation and integration all need to be prioritized.

Greater transparency and harmony will not only optimize the new SDN/NFV network technology stack, it will transform the service chain. Configuring and provisioning, orchestrating and monitoring all get a lot easier when systems, standards and tools are all playing in the same sandbox with the same rules.

Effective performance management is particularly dependent on cross-platform, cross-protocol visibility. In today’s increasingly connected world, network operations do not want disparate metrics from disparate monitoring tools; they want integrated, intelligent analytics on a single dashboard. This level of insight is not only essential for problem resolution and capacity planning at the back-end, but also the customer experience at the front end.

Swing into action

The adoption of next-gen network technologies is increasingly about enriching the customer experience. Nearly 90 per cent of organizations deploying SDN or NFV are being driven by service enablement, according to research by Current Analysis.

But organizations will only be able to achieve these service enablement goals if they can safeguard the availability and capacity of every component in the technology stack. If one component is out of reach of the performance management solution, it will be game over – for the business and the customer.

Instead of fighting over who gets to play with what toy in the sandbox, we need to open up the entire playground. We need to enable not encumber. We need to help customers drive greater competitive advantage through unified IT and a unified ecosystem.

Now pass me that bucket and shovel please – it’s sand castle time!

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