EDITORIAL
 

Béatrice Durand Marketing Director Ipanema Technologies

Are all your ducks in a row?
You are about to launch your new project, you have selected the technology, you’ve got the budget approved and even your boss is supportive. What about a last check before the final countdown?

Need a managed service? We’re happy to welcome a new MSP partner, Brittanics Technologies, who is launching NetManager, based on Ipanema (see Jonathan Sharp’s interview). 

Need more technical training & updates?
We’re announcing our new e-learning services for improved training flexibility (see the News section).

Need a tight coupling of the network to your business?
WAN GovernanceTM is a new concept that embraces the key business benefits of a predictable and fast network in a Top-Down management approach (see page 2).

Want to share views with us?
To provide regular updates and discussions about the different aspects of WAN Governance, we opened a specific blog site where we talk about different topics in relation with network-to-business alignment. We hope you visit http://www.wan-governance.com soon and send us comments.

PARTNER STORY
 

Jonathan Sharp Sales & Marketing Director Britannic Technologies Limited

Innovative managed service NetManager was born from a new partnership between Ipanema Technologies and Britannic Technologies
Béatrice Durand for Ipanews: Jonathan, who is Britannic Technologies?
Jonathan Sharp: Britannic Technologies is a privately owned company with 25 years experience in providing quality voice and data solutions, with a high level of technical know-how and customer service.   Throughout our history, we have focused on working with our customers in partnership and adding tangible business value through effective use of technology, more recently focusing on providing unified communications and network convergence.

BD: Why did you decide to create a managed service focused on application performance?
JS: A big driver of network convergence has been the efficiencies that can be achieved through delivering multiple services (voice, data and video) over a single, yet flexible network infrastructure. After 5 years of providing multi-functional networks, we recognized a significant requirement for a focus on application performance. Such services promise further business value by effectively managing multiple applications across the network and creating a better alignment of the applications with business needs. This approach enables businesses to set guaranteed SLAs on application performance based on user profile and application importance. Coupled with the growing demand for managed services and outsourced technical skills, we saw a significant market opportunity.

BD: Can you tell us more about NetManager?
JS: NetManager is the name of Britannic’s managed service.  It uses the carrier-class SALSA platform from Ipanema hosted in the carrier-grade Global Switch 1 and delivers the core functions of Ipanema: Visibility, Optimization, Acceleration and WAN Governance. NetManager enables us to build large-scale, application-centric services, while keeping the total cost of ownership to a minimum and removing the complexity of network setup and management, thereby extending the reach and affordability of Ipanema to the market.

BD: How will Britannic’s customers benefit from this service?
JS: Our customers will benefit tremendously from NetManager, which will greatly improve network and application performance—without them having to make significant investments in technical resource and their own enterprise solutions. The improved control will enable them to configure their network based upon business rules and achieve greater efficiencies by right-sizing and scaling the network as required by their business, via access to quantifiable information.

BD: Why did you choose Ipanema to develop NetManager?
JS: Following a significant review across the market, we found that the core offerings from Ipanema were an ideal fit to support our customers’ requirements and our vision for our managed services portfolio. Our decision was formed largely due to the strength of the technology compared to the competition, the wide range of solutions that could be supported through a single scalable platform (including some unique elements) and the hosted options that will enable us to provide an affordable yet high-quality service to market.

Thierry Grenot Chief Technical Officer Ipanema Technologies

WAN Governance: enterprise’s business, first.
Béatrice Durand for Ipanews: Thierry, what does WAN Governance mean to enterprises?
Thierry Grenot: WAN Governance is a unique way to manage the WAN from a business perspective rather than from a technical point of view. It aims at aligning the network to the enterprise’s business.

BD: What are the enterprise challenges for application networking?
TG: On the one hand, enterprises know that employee productivity requires predictable application performance, anywhere, anytime. To optimize efficiency, they need to adapt their IT architecture to modern business processes and a WAN that is always fast. On the other hand, enterprises are also required to optimize their cost structure, including IT and network resources. Combining these two aspects in a flexible and manageable way is the goal of WAN Governance.

BD: Practically speaking, what does it mean?
TG: It is not rocket science, rather a fair dose of common sense allied to a clear Top-Down approach: 1) Decide about objectives 2) Understand the current situation 3) Compare the situation to the objectives 4) Decide corrective or improvement actions 5) Apply them 6) Measure results and evaluate gaps with the objectives 7) And so on… This process has to be easy and fully supported by appropriate tools, like the Ipanema system. It can be performed internally or through services offered by Ipanema or its certified partners.

BD: What are the benefits that WAN Governance federates?
TG: We categorize WAN Governance outcomes in 4 main benefits:
• User experience guarantee, leading to predictable business processes;
• Business application acceleration to improve user productivity;
• Network operations simplification to enable the network team to concentrate on serving people, not machines; and finally
• Network–related cost reduction, built on IT agility, bandwidth reduction, better use of the Internet and low TCO.

BD: How do these benefits work together?
TG: It is important to not consider all these benefits independently, but as a part of a coherent entity that serve a common goal, global to the enterprise: its business. In term of product, it means a fully integrated platform, which we will detail in a newsletter to come.

BD: Why is Ipanema pioneering WAN Governance?
TG: I believe that Autonomic Networking, which is at the core of our platform, is a key enabler of WAN governance. The fundamental idea of Autonomic Networking is that it is possible to design distributed systems that automatically collaborate and adapt to fast-changing situations in order to achieve a global and common goal.

BD: What is the main challenge of Autonomic Networking? TG: Dynamic and complex demand (traffic) versus static infrastructure (network). The good news is that nowadays this is feasible: while the human brain is a very slow device able to deal with dreadfully complex problems, computers are communicating machines able to solve thousands of simple issues in a single second: associating the two of them leads to a system that is humanly managed at an objective-level while processors collectively take care in real-time of all the micro-decisions according to actual—and unpredictable— situations in order to meet the defined objectives.

Autonomic Networking brings network management from its current childhood (devices have to obey) to the maturity of adulthood (devices can decide).