NetEvents

NetEvents issue the 2012 Calendar of Summits

2012-01-03T16:04:00.002Z

NetEvents calendar of Summits for 2012:

EMEA Press & Analyst Summit, Garmisch, Germany – February 23rd & 24th

Asia Pacific Press & Analyst Summit, Hong Kong – April 24th & 25th

Asia Pacific Service Provider VIP Summit, Hong Kong – April 25th & 26th

Americas Press & SP Summit, Miami, USA – June 14th & 15th

European Press & Analyst Summit, Portugal – Sept 26th & 27th

European Service Provider VIP Summit, Portugal – Sept 27th & 28th

Asia-Pacific Press & Analyst Summit, Thailand – November 14th & 15th

Middle East & Africa Press & SP Summit, location tba, December 5th & 6th

NetEvents APAC Press Summit ,Thailand - Day 2 Highlights

2011-11-21T17:03:00.005Z

Datacentre transformation “changes economies and business models” claims John McHugh at NetEvents 2011 APAC Summit

2-day Summit climaxes with visionary advice for surviving 2012

November 22nd, Phuket, Thailand: John McHugh gave the closing keynote at NetEvents 2011 APAC Press Summit at the Indigo Pearl, Phuket, Thailand today. Taking a year of challenging and insightful presentations from NetEvents summits across the globe during 2011, McHugh distilled the essence of what will become critical issues for CIOs in Asia over the next few years. His advice rounded off the 2-day conference which included debates on current industry issues and trends plus round table press and analyst briefings attended by an audience of top execs from Arista Networks, Brocade, Extreme Networks, Fortinet, Blue Coat Systems, HP Networking, MEF, Niometrics, Sourcefire, UIH, IDC, Gartner, Analysys Mason, Market Clarity, Ovum, Forrester Research and others.

“The trend towards datacentre transformation is inexorable - it will change economies and business models", said McHugh, counted among network world’s “top 50 most powerful people in networking” and known for his insight and sharp analysis of trends. "This past year, business leaders have worked in an environment full of challenges for the future. They will be thinking about risk," he said, arguing that IT was or should be transformational, especially given the growth of new end-user devices that offer new ways of workforce provisioning. On storage, he said: "we are feasting on more information – it’s important because the CIO needs to lead the strategy around information”.

http://www.netevents.org/events/binaries/Thailand2011/20111117-Closing-Keynote-transcript.pdf

The day began with Ian Keene, Vice President, Gartner introducing a HEAD 2 HEAD challenge between another of this year’s hottest Silicon Valley start-ups, Arista Networks, and three of the biggest global names in networking – Brocade, Extreme and HP – with a multimillion dollar virtualisation deal on the table – who takes the prize? This was an key opportunity for Arista – one of the hottest new names in Silicon Valley – choosing the NetEvents Summit as the launch pad into the APAC market for their Extensible Operating System (EOS™) based platform. Douglas Gourlay, VP, Arista Networks, emphasised the importance of openness: "People don't want a large, flat, layer-two network, and smart network engineers don't want to build or operate them”. He introduced EOS as a ground-breaking network operating system with single-image consistency across hardware platforms, and modern core architecture enabling in-service upgrades and application extensibility.

Other key highlights:

- John McHugh, CMO & VP, Brocade, hit back with: "our presentations are like our networks - faster than Arista!" He went on to argue: "80% of network traffic will be going east-west, not north-south as the network was designed to work. Brocade’s fabric gets rid of one aggregation layer to save power, and consolidate your edge layer to create a universal touch point for most of your datacentre devices."

- Shehzad Merchant, VP of Technology, Extreme Networks, said: "Everything is converging on Ethernet with no more separate network technologies for HPC, SANs and data."

- Erik Papir, Worldwide Director, HP, said: "You need to look at the overall infrastructure in the datacentre not just the network. Compute power and storage are going to be critical to enable the instant-on enterprise."

http://www.netevents.org/events/binaries/Thailand2011/20111117-Head-2-Head-transcript.pdf

http://www.netevents.org/events/binaries/Thailand2011/20111117-Head-2-Head-presentation.pdf

http://www.netevents.org/events/binaries/Thailand2011/20111117-Arista-H2H-presentation.pdf

http://www.netevents.org/events/binaries/Thailand2011/20111117-Brocade-H2H-presentation.pdf

http://www.netevents.org/events/binaries/Thailand2011/20111117-Extreme-Networks-H2H-presentation.pdf

http://www.netevents.org/events/binaries/Thailand2011/20111117-HP-H2H-presentation.pdf

The second session Ethernet's role in the Cloud, was introduced and chaired by Matt Walker, Principal Analyst, Ovum. Key highlights included: highlights:

- Shehzad Merchant, VP of Technology, Extreme Networks: "How do you take things like group identities into the cloud?"

- Deb Dutta, VP Asia-Pacific, Brocade: "You need a cloud ID that allows you to demarcate your domain in the cloud and migrate from one SP to another."

- Nan Chen, President, MEF said it was “working on an ID standard so you can classify VMs and assign them priorities."

http://www.netevents.org/events/binaries/Thailand2011/20111117-DebateII-transcript.pdf

http://www.netevents.org/events/binaries/Thailand2011/20111117-DebateII-presentation.pdf

Session III – From Desktop to Smart Devices – implications for infrastructure, management & security – was introduced and chaired by Tim Dillon, AVP Asia Pacific End User & Mobility Research, IDC. Key highlights included:

- Jonathan Andresen, product and solutions director APAC, Blue Coat Systems: "Cloud security is the first line of defence. Catch malware in the cloud and you don't let it into your network."

- Shehzad Merchant, VP of Technology, Extreme Networks: "Security should be multi-level and omni-present."

- Shara Evans, CEO, Market Clarity: "End-user devices are insecure because they get left in taxis. So the network needs to understand who the user is, as they may not be authentic."

http://www.netevents.org/events/binaries/Thailand2011/20111117-DebateIII-transcript.pdf

http://www.netevents.org/events/binaries/Thailand2011/20111117-DebateIII-presentation.pdf

NetEvents contact:

Helen Whitworth

Tel: +44 (0)870 760 6464

Email: helenw ‘at’ netevents.org

NetEvents APAC Press Summit Day 2 - November 17th

2011-11-17T11:48:00.005Z

Day two of the NetEvents conference in Phuket, Thailand, opened with a fantasy.

Ian Keene, VP at research firm Gartner, pretended to be a late CIO at a company that was late at adopting cloud computing. With the help of panellists Douglas Gourlay, VP Arista; John McHugh, VP & CMO, Brocade; Shehzad Merchant, VP of Technology, Extreme Networks; and Erik Papir, Worldwide Director, HP, all of whom pitched for his 'business', Keene had to decide how to upgrade his datacentre. Fellow analysts Tim Dillon, AVP APAC End User & Mobility Research, IDC and Michael Barnes, VP Research, Forrester, acted as consultants to help him make his decision.

Gourlay said that Keene's company's IT dept was not innovating or creating value for the business. He suggested that Keene should ask any vendor of datacentre network fabrics if their technology was open and if you could replace parts of their solution with products from another vendor. "People don't want a large, flat, layer-two network," he said. "Smart network engineers don't want to build or operate them - vendors are trying to lock you in."

For Brocade, McHugh quipped that "our presentations are like our networks - faster than Arista." He went on to argue that "80% of network traffic will be going east-west, not north-south as the network was designed to work. Our fabric gets rid of one aggregation layer to save power, and consolidate your edge layer to create a universal touch point for most of your datacentre devices."

Merchant said that today, everything is converging on Ethernet with no more separate network technologies for HPC, SANs and data. "Flat networks are better, with active-active paths so that recovery is under 50ms," he said. "You need 40Gbps for the aggregation layer, and you cannot be tied into a proprietary technology - so you need an open fabric."

Papir argued: "You need to look at the overall infrastructure in the datacentre not just the network. Compute power and storage are going to be critical to enable the instant-on enterprise." He went on to say that a framework to address business needs such as cloud deployment can enable end to end virtualisation. "It can consolidate management systems, and we are open," he said. "We work with you to ensure interoperability is not a problem."

Keene asked for help to be more green and use less energy. All the vendors promised to radically cut power consumption radically, and reduce the rack space needed. Merchant said that Extreme would help with analytics too and that his company would provide tools to examine the network down to the level of individual virtual machines.

The 'consultants' asked the vendors how they could help Keene drive change inside his organisation. All promised consulting services, along with free trials using virtual machines.

The discussion moved to applications and it was generally agreed that some applications will be suited to cloud, while others will not, depending on the workload. It was agreed that critical data should be kept local for the time being at least.

At the end, the audience of press and analysts were asked to vote on which vendor they would choose, a poll won by Arista with 34%, closely followed by Brocade with 32%, then Extreme Networks at 18% and HP 16%.

The next debate, Ethernet's role in the cloud, was opened by Matt Walker, Principal Analyst, Ovum, joined by panellists Deb Dutta, VP Asia-Pacific, Brocade; Shehzad Merchant; Nan Chen, President, MEF; and Passakorn Hongsyok, Director International Business from the Thai service provider UIH.

Walker defined the term cloud and sized the cloud services market at $233 billion by 2016. As a telecoms analyst, he pointed out that cloud is not a core focus for telcos but said that they can benefit from the connectivity gap, as the last mile is an issue.

He explained the benefits of Carrier Ethernet as flexibility, scalability, diversity and redundancy, describing it as a facilitator of the cloud. "Ethernet now the de facto access standard," he said.

Asked if there was scope for smaller telcos, Hongsyok said that Ethernet business was growing rapidly and that customers want rapid deployments.

Merchant highlighted the challenge of dealing with IT management tools and policies. "How do you take things like group identities into the cloud?", he asked.

Dutta talked about the importance of standards so that customers could develop an exit strategy from a cloud provider's facility. "You need a cloud ID that allows you to demarcate your domain in the cloud and migrate from one SP to another," he said.

Chen said that the MEF "was working on an ID standard so you can classify VMs and assign them priorities."

The final debate of the day concerned the trend from desktop to mobile devices and asked what are the implications from infrastructure, management and security perspectives?

The panel for this debate consisted of Jonathan Andresen, product and solutions director APAC, Blue Coat Systems; Shehzad Merchant, Extreme Networks; and Shara Evans, CEO, Market Clarity.

It was opened by Tim Dillon, IDC, who described the dominance of mobile devices in Asia-Pacific, using examples of airline crew and corporate execs using tablets. "Market growth will come from applications, a lot of which are downloaded from the cloud. There's no single OS in the enterprise any more," he said. The problems this raises include complexity and security.

Andresen said that network managers wanted to know how mobility was developing in their enterprise, and that they want to know what it will do to their network. "Video can swamp the network," he said.

Merchant said that the network needs to understand who the user is and what they are trying to do, and that security should be multi-level and omni-present.

For Evans, end-user devices are insecure because they get left in taxis. "The network needs to understand who the user is, as they may not be authentic," she said.

Andresen argued that putting data in the cloud enhanced security. "Cloud security is the first line of defence," he said. "Catch malware in the cloud and you don't let it into your network."

Brocade's chief marketing officer and VP John McHugh rounded out the final plenary session of the event with a keynote entitled NetEvents 2011: The Takeaways.

"This year, business leaders worked in an environment full of challenges for the future. They will be thinking about risk," he said. He argued that IT was or should be transformational especially given the growth of new end-user devices which offer new ways of workforce provisioning.

On storage, he said that "we are feasting on more information - its important because the CIO needs to lead their strategy around information.

"CIOs can't opt out," he said, as questions from the CFO and CIO will drive transformation while on-premise datacentres will be prime locations for years to come as datacentres virtualise. Crucial to the process is the network which is not yet robust enough. However, he said, "the trend is inexorable - it will change economies and business models."

On datacentre network fabrics, McHugh predicted that in next six months, over 50% of CIOs will be deploying a network fabric in their datacentre, and that it would be part of a converged infrastructure.

On outsourcing and the cloud, McHugh described his early days as a production engineer at HP when the decision had to be made to outsource production to Singapore. "Ultimately, HP started looking at quitting a capital-intensive practice because someone at the top had the vision and understood that trends, directions and options needed that leadership. It's now ridiculous to think we wouldn't have moved forward. The cloud is the same. The biggest risk is that the competition does it first."

He was then interviewed onstage by editorial director Manek Dubash, who asked about storage architectures, datacentre transformation, and network reliability, among other things.

The meeting then broke for lunch, resuming with scheduled meetings between press and vendors.

A list of links to the NetEvents APAC Press Summit Day 2 Transcripts, Presentations and Photos can be downloaded from this URL:

http://www.netevents.org/events/binaries/Thailand2011/NetEvents-APAC-Press-Summit-Nov-2011-Day2-URLs.pdf

(Transcripts will be available within 24 hours)

NetEvents APAC Press Summit Day 1 - November 16th.

2011-11-16T15:06:00.003Z

From bad boy hacker to founder and CTO of Silicon Valley “hot start-up” Palo Alto Networks – Nir Zuk launches NetEvents 2011 APAC Summit

“Creative innovation on the right side of the law” is theme of Day One keynote

November 16^th , Phuket, Thailand: Today’s opening keynote at NetEvents 2011 APAC Summit introduced the founder and CTO of one of this year’s most talked-about Silicon Valley start-ups.

CTO of Palo Alto Networks Nir Zuk's keynote speech, entitled Creative innovation on the right side of the law, highlighted the complexity of the IT security problems facing enterprises today. He explained how hackers were becoming highly professional, financially motivated, and are able easily to penetrate the perimeter defences of the corporation.

"It takes just five steps," said Zuk, as he detailed the way that hackers target individual employees using social media, and persuade them to open a back door into the enterprise network by downloading an infected document that appears to contain information about one of their hobbies or interests.

Zuk said that it takes security companies two months to respond to such attacks because they are not widespread but highly targeted.

"If it only happens once, security vendors will not find it," Zuk said. "And even then it can take a week or more to fix. Every executable is a suspect, and there aren't enough security researchers in the world to fix all the vulnerabilities."

Zuk said that his company's firewall technology fixes the problem because it looks at all documents and executables in a virtual machine and watches for malware-like behaviour. "We do it in software in a datacentre and generate signatures for each piece of malware," Zuk said. "We can then block it within an hour."

Zuk created some of the first computer viruses before going straight and laying the foundations for stateful inspection, a technique now used by all firewalls, and intruder prevention systems, which offer inline protection for enterprise networks.

Following the opening plenary sessions, an audience including press and analysts representing more than 70 publications in 15 countries across the Asia Pacific region participated in a series of briefings with top execs from Arista Networks, Brocade, Extreme Networks, Fortinet, Blue Coat Systems, HP Networking, MEF, Niometrics, Sourcefire, UIH, IDC, Gartner, Analysys Mason, Market Clarity, Ovum, Forrester Research and many others.

A list of the NetEvents APAC Press Summit Day 1 Transcripts, Presentations and Photos can be downloaded from this URL: http://www.netevents.org/events/binaries/Thailand2011/NetEvents-APAC-Press-Summit-Nov-2011-Day1-URLs.pdf

NetEvents APAC Press Summit - Day 1 highlights.

2011-11-16T10:42:00.003Z

Keynote: Nir Zuk, CTO, Palo AltoNetworks

Palo Alto Networks' CTO Nik Zuk opened NetEvents' first visit to Thailand, the event being held in a hotel on the beach in Phuket. Amid tropical vegetation and humidity, Zuk highlighted the IT security problems facing today's enterprises. They were characterised, he said, by the fact that malware authors were no longer disaffected geeks but serious people targeting specific individuals inside specific corporations with the aim of breaching perimeter defences to steal money and corporate IP.

It takes five steps, Zuk said. The malware persuades an end user to open a document, using a technique known as spear fishing -- this means using information from sites such as LinkedIn and FaceBook to find information about an individual who works for a particular organisation. They are sent an infected document which they are persuaded to open. This then downloads an executable that installs itself and opens up a back channel to the hacker, who can access that machine and through it, the rest of the organisation.

Zuk reckoned that it takes security companies two months to respond to such attacks because they are not widespread but highly targeted.

He claimed that his company's firewall technology fixes the problem because it looks at all documents and executables in a virtual machine and watches for malware-like behaviour. "We do it in software in a datacentre and generate signatures for each piece of malware," Zuk said. "We can then block it within an hour."

Tim Dillon: Cyber-attacks

After questions to Zuk from NetEvents' editorial director Manek Dubash and from the floor, the agenda stayed with security, this time led by IDC analyst Tim Dillon, who talked about cyber-attacks.

Dillon outlined how online identity was now the front line for security, while credit card details -- once the malware authors' equivalent of gold dust -- were now worth very little. The problem said Dillon is that the sheer volumes of data are flooding security vendors, with some seven zettabytes expected to exist by 2014. "The environment today is trillions of things, billions of users, and millions of applications," he said.

A question from the floor opened the issue of whether the enterprise perimeter is dead from a security perspective. Panel member Eric Chan of Fortinet said that perimeter security is the first line of attack and cited the attacks on Sony's website as an example. Mike Haro of Palo Alto Networks said that web application firewalls are not a total solution as you need to understand what the traffic is. Leon Ward of SourceFire said that application traffic has changed and that the visibility and context of that traffic are the important issues.

Discussing the importance of automation of malware analysis, all the technology vendors said that automation played a vital part. They also agreed that trust relationships were changing, and that an adaptive agile approach was needed to manage the ever-changing tide of malware.

Paul Sumner: e-Government and the cloud

Paul Sumner, senior manager at analyst firm Analysys Mason, then presented research on e-Government and the cloud, looking at the drivers for change, and strategies to address challenges.

He argued that governments are looking to the cloud to lower costs, improve services and gain greater insight into their citizens. Their challenges are to decide which services to migrate to the cloud, the choice of deployment model, and the rate of migration. He said they need to decide on data ownership, interoperability and infrastructure availability.

Sumner gave examples of governments' cloud strategies including the US, Singapore, Japan, India and the UK. He said the top challenges are security, legacy applications, cultural resistance in IT, and evolving standards, while alleviations are quality SLAs, the prioritisation of high value services, and sharing information on successful implementations.

In terms of practical progress, Sumner said that we are at an early stage. "There's lots of strategy but it's a work in progress," he said. "Governments are approaching cloud as a way of making savings and they could make up to 20-25%".

Asked if we could see a global e-government cloud, Sumner said this was "unlikely".

Ian Keene - telecoms and networking in Asia-Pacific

Looking at the big picture, Gartner VP Ian Keene said that governments believe that providing broadband and comms will spur economic growth, while service providers see broadband access as revenue opportunity. The main barrier, said Keene, is sufficient investment.

Keene then talked about specific markets in Asia-Pacific. Australia and China are huge markets, along with Singapore, Korea and Hong Kong, where broadband reached has saturation. He contrasted these with developing opportunities in Thailand, and India. Unlike Europe, where copper-based DSL holds sway and is offering ever-greater speeds, he said that for broadband, "it's a fibre world in Asia-Pacific, especially now that the region is aligned with the rest of the world and uses GPON optical technology.

Regulations are holding back new technologies by increasing risk, said Keene. "This means you need virtual local loop unbundling -- that's unbundling the bitstream not the physical infrastructure," he said.

Again contrasting APAC with Europe, Keene said Asia was slow to adopt LTE due to problems of spectrum release and licensing slowness. He noted though that numbers of cellular users in Asia are growing rapidly, while in Europe bandwidth growth not user growth is the pattern.

NetEvents APAC Press Summit opens tomorrow (November 16th) in Phuket, Thailand.

2011-11-15T17:15:00.004Z

The NetEvents APAC Press Summit opens with a Keynote Presentation by Nir Zuk, serial entrepreneur and founder and CTO , Palo Alto Networks.

Nir Zuk is a captivating speaker and the audience should be prepared to be surprised by his radical mind and outspoken views, as he shares his vision of malware to come and new approaches to defeat it.

Day one of the conference includes:

Tim Dillon, AVP Asia Pacific End User & Mobility Research, IDC who chairs Conference Debate Session I - Defending the Enterprise from the latest generation of Cyberattacks. His panel includes Stree Naidu, VP of Asia Pacific and Japan, Imperva; Emilio Roman, Vice President of Sales Operations, Fortinet; Mike Haro, Director of Corporate Communications, Palo Alto Networks; Leon Ward, Field Product Manager, Sourcefire

A presentation by Paul Sumner, Senior Manager - Broadband, Asia-Pacific,Analysys Mason on ‘e-Government and the Cloud: an overview of drivers for change and strategies to address challenges’.

Ian Keene, Vice President, Gartner is ’In the HOT SEAT’ answering questions about ‘The 5-year outlook for networking and telecoms – key trends and their impact in Asia’.

Full transcripts and PPT presentations of day one will be available at the following URL’s within 24hours :

Keynote Presentation by Nir Zuk, serial entrepreneur and founder, Palo Alto Networks – Presentation and draft transcript

http://www.netevents.org/events/binaries/Thailand2011/20111116-Keynote-presentation.pdf

http://www.netevents.org/events/binaries/Thailand2011/20111116-Keynote-transcript.pdf

Conference Debate Session I - Defending the Enterprise from the latest generation of Cyberattacks – Presentation and draft transcript

http://www.netevents.org/events/binaries/Thailand2011/20111116-DebateI-presentation.pdf

http://www.netevents.org/events/binaries/Thailand2011/20111116-DebateI-transcript.pdf

Presentation by: Paul Sumner, Senior Manager - Broadband, Asia-Pacific, Analysys Mason – Presentation and draft transcript

http://www.netevents.org/events/binaries/Thailand2011/20111116-Presentation-presentation.pdf

http://www.netevents.org/events/binaries/Thailand2011/20111116-Presentation-transcript.pdf

'In the HOT SEAT' – draft transcript

http://www.netevents.org/events/binaries/Thailand2011/20111116-In-The-Hot-Seat-transcript.pdf

Technology movers & shakers are converging on Phuket, Thailand, for year’s NetEvents APAC Summit

2011-11-03T17:42:00.002Z

The two hottest pre-IPO companies from Silicon Valley – plus top execs from HP, Brocade, Extreme, Bluecoat and more – make NetEvents APAC 2011 Summit THE place to network on 16/17^th November

2011’s been a topsy-turvy year for the IT industry, with both the promises and the threats of The Cloud looming over us, with smart-phones toppling governments, Wiki-leaks undermining PR campaigns, a revival of interest in Software Defined Networks and the passing of Steve Jobs, patron saint of user friendly IT…

Time to take a deep breath, and spend a couple of day’s quality time mixing with the best brains in the business and finding out what to prepare for in 2012… for that is what the NetEvents APAC Summit in Phuket is all about.

There will be top executives from HP, Extreme and Brocade’s Silicon Valley offices there, plus MEF President Nan Chen and key players from many others including SourceFire, Fortinet, BlueCoat and Bluecat to name just a few.

Which are the two “hottest” pre-IPO networking companies in Silicon Valley right now? Most would name Palo Alto Networks and Arista Networks – and we have top execs from BOTH companies attending NetEvents and featuring:

· Palo Alto’s official main launch in to the APAC market, headed by serial entrepreneur Nir Zuk who invented the Firewall when at CheckPoint, then created the world’s first Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) and is now leading his latest start-up company into a radical new approach to security

· Arista Networks, it’s also their formal APAC press launch. Co-founded by industry legend Andy Bechtolsheim (founder and Chief Architect of Sun and the guy that wrote Google’s initial seed fund cheque of $100,000 – according to Wikipedia, this turned in to $1.7 billion) and former Cisco #2 Jayshree Ullal (voted among the “Top 50 most influential people in networking”). Jayshree is President & CEO of Arista and VP of Marketing Douglas Gourlay will be joining us in Phuket - he’s a terrific public speaker!

So what more’s in store for the lucky attendees? As well as two days rubbing shoulders with the industry’s movers and shakers in the relaxed yet focused environment of a world-class hotel, there’s an outstanding conference programme including the following highlights:

· Opening keynote from Nir Zuk followed by Q&A session on new thinking to keep ahead of modern malware

· Follow up debate on defending the enterprise from new-generation cyber attacks, chaired by Tim Dillon, AVP Asia Pacific End User & Mobility Research, IDC

· A ‘Quick Fire’ crystal ball shootout when we challenge the analysts to come up with their hottest predictions

· Ian Keene, Vice President, Gartner, challenging industry greats Arista, Brocade, Extreme Networks and HP to fight “Head 2 Head” for a major virtualization contract

· “Ethernet's role in the Cloud” debate chaired by Matt Walker, Principal Analyst, Ovum

· A debate on the implications of the trend from desktop to smart handheld devices, lead by Tim Dillon, IDC

Last but not least we have the acclaimed NetEvents speaker John McHugh, Brocade’s Chief Marketing Officer. Voted among the world’s “Top 50 most influential people in networking” when running HP Networking Worldwide and growing their business from around $20M to well over a $billion during his tenure, John faces the challenging task of rounding off the year 2011 – and a year of NetEvents Summits – by distilling some really sound practical advice for the coming year – not to forget some of his perceptive (as well as provocative!) predictions for 2012.

With the opportunity to quiz these top executives in front of their competitors on-stage, as well as sitting down in small groups of individually schedules briefings, plus shared hospitality events and quality time together in comfortable surroundings… what more can we say but:

“NetEvents APAC Summit – be there or get lost in the Cloud!”

NetEvents APAC Press and Analyst Summit, Phuket, Thailand

2011-10-27T16:48:00.000+01:00

NetEvents APAC Press and Analyst Summit takes place is just a few weeks time at the beautiful Indigo Pearl hotel in Phuket, Thailand.

There are concerns about the weather in Northern Thailand with flooding reported amid torrential rain but fortunately Phuket is defying the storm and it is sunny, hot and clear blue skies!

The headline on the Phuket weather blogspot: http://phuket-weather.blogspot.com/2011/10/sun-and-only-sun-certainly-no-floods.html is Sun and only sun. Certainly no floods.

Bangkok International airport, is currently operating as normal. And there are online news reports that beach resorts to Bangkok's south and east are unaffected by the torrential rain.

Phuket is approx. 850km south of Bangkok and has experienced beautiful weather for the past two weeks, remaining totally unaffected by flooding.

NetEvents Service Provider summit, Frascati

2011-10-07T11:56:00.001+01:00

Service Provider summit, Frascati

Long-time NetEvents attendee Camille Mendler, principal analyst at Informa, opened the final day's plenary proceedings here in Frascati.

To set the scene, she presented an overview of the cloud under the rubric of transformative business models, and highlighted some of the telecoms companies' activities in this area.

She pointed out that the number of telco cloud services launched has doubled in the last couple of years but that telcos are not being as innovative as they could be, describing them as the bottom feeders of the market, focused on the IaaS market.

Using concrete examples, Mendler said that telcos are mainly copying pure-play cloud providers rather than innovating, and are not playing to their strengths such as their expertise with and ability to manage the network.

She urged them to think about traditional services in a different way, and to use the cloud to reinvent legacy services.

The remaining presentations were case studies of how telcos are delivering cloud services, the first of which was BT's Alessandro Canzian, head of global telecom markets in Italy.

Canzian highlighted BT's On Demand Compute offering, its service levels, and physical and logical security measures. He also pointed out that customers can obtain individual statements of their carbon footprint for use in their annual reports.

He then explained BT's white label services and its virtual datacentre service, designed to act as underpinnings for systems integrators' own offerings.

Tim Gigg, Head of International Transport Programmes at Vodafone then took the stage and said he had just come back from building networks in Africa. He described how there was a strong business case for new infrastructure, especially fibre, in the continent. As a result, he said, two new cables, each with 5.12 terabit capacity, were due to reach Africa by the end of 2012.

He went on to describe how his team had laid fibre in Ghana to professional standards, to replace fibre that had been simply dropped on the ground. As a result of this project, Gigg said, Accra and 10 regional towns were now connected, and connections to adjoining countries were now possible. they key business opportunities were mining and energy companies, and the emerging middle class, he said.

The final event was a joint presentation from Akber Jaffer, VP Strategy Data Centre Services at COLT, and Tate Cantrell, CTO, Verne Global, a datacentre building company.

We aim to build efficient datacentres, the engines behind the cloud, said Cantrell. In a commodity industry, which cloud will eventually become, you will get the best profit by moving to the most efficient location, he said. This was why Verne has built a modular datacentre based on renewable power - with zero emissions - at the south-western tip of Iceland, he said.

Jaffer pointed out how efficiently COLT could build datacentres by modularising and using production line techniques - much like the car industry. It is fast and capital efficient, he said, and means a new module takes just four months from design to power on, compared to years for traditional methods.

Cantrell added that one of the advantages of Iceland was its server-friendly climate, the availability of geo-thermal and hydro-electric power, and the ability to lock in power prices for 20 years.

With that, editorial director Manek Dubash closed the plenary event, which continued with meetings between service providers, vendors and the analysts present.

NetEvents EMEA Summit Frascati - Press and Vendor meetings summary.

2011-10-07T11:27:00.004+01:00

Vendor meetings summary:

A key element of the NetEvents press summit formula is the meetings between press and vendors, so here we present a summary of some of the vendor meetings.

ECI Telecom - Matthias Nass, VP Field Marketing, EMEA

About the company: we have 2,600 employees, we do internet transport and wireless infrastructure, BT is a key customer and uses our equipment for next generation access. We are strong in utilities - especially those moving towards becoming a u-telco. We are strong in India, China and Latin America. We see telcos moving to the cloud - such as Deutsche Telekom's T-Cloud service.

Vision: we need more fibre to the kerb - or at least closer to the end user - if cloud is to succeed. What do telcos need to become successful? End user acceptance. Today, SMBs are quickest to the cloud. Telcos need to move away from the network and add more value.

Yet telcos are focusing on big enterprises not SMBs. They are slower to the cloud because they have problems of regulation and net neutrality that SPs do not. Russia and Asia have fewer regulatory brakes so end users are getting fibre where Europeans are not - but problem there is multiple providers aiming for the richest / low-hanging fruit.

VMware - Joe Baguley, Chief Cloud Technologist, EMEA

VMware recently made a vCloud global connect announcement where three service providers announced a global cloud: BlueLock, SingTel, and COLT. The aim is to allow you to move VMs easily to an service provider in the cloud. Some telcos provide secure/ guaranteed bandwidth which they can then put a service wrapper around as Orange Business Services does - it sells cloud as a service: you don't rent servers but a service.

People don't want to manage operating systems so telcos and service providers will move away from infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Rather, people want managed services, for example CloudFoundry, which is an orchestration a layer above a bunch of virtual machines (VMs) and allows the hardware platform to provide the resilience etc.

We need to learn how to orchestrate VMs - you can then sell it to enterprises and service providers. Everyone is moving up the stack from IaaS upwards. CloudFoundry is doing this - is the biggest growing part of cloud and telcos will move there.

The future will see MVP - mobile virtual iPhone / Android - which allows you to deploy a work phone onto your Android, which is good for BYOD (bring your own device) environments. Mobile providers and telcos need to understand how this works as there's only one SIM. We are talking to providers about that - they are arguing and bidding as to who can be first to do it. Samsung and LG are first hardware vendors involved.

Other news

Check out VMware AppBlast - delivery of apps to any html5 device.

We bought SlideRocket, Zimbra - have Project Octopus (from EMC Mozy) - is a corporate Dropbox that does collaborative documents, chat etc.

VXLan - also launched at the recent VMworld - can move VMs around without breaking VLANs and IP addresses.

Tata Communications - James Walker, Head of Managed Network Services

We are working with global companies just below the top tier. We aim to be more flexible, more aggressive, eg selling network services on a per-seat basis. Companies that do a lot of M&A are interested. It means the customer no longer has to dictate the network topology - we do all that.

We launched a virtual Ethernet platform last year that allows multiple datacentres to be treated as one virtual datacentre, good for companies spread across multiple facilities. It allows us to do deterministic routes.

This is all on our own network - we own about 25% of the world's capacity - large proportion is used by our own IP business, about 2.5Pbits/month, plus clear channel services which adds up to about 80% of the total bandwidth, while the rest is consumed by MPLS and voice. We will shortly own a ring of fibre all the way around the planet.

Datacentres - we bought TeleGlobe and Tyco Networks so we inherited those, and built 15,000 sq.m. datacentre facility in Singapore, and others in India and S Africa, all on our network.

This supports our new InstaCompute scalable cloud offering in Singapore, and covering neighbouring countries: Malaysia, Hong Kong, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines. The IaaS service enables Asia Pacific businesses to use a global infrastructure via the Internet without the cost and complexities associated with IT provisioning.

Tata aims to be in top five of all the businesses we are in. Competitors operate in Europe and are unsuccessful but we have a $100m business here - we sell well in France.

Mobile is not strategic for us - we are focused on fixed line.

There's a gap in the market for mobile experience because in developed nations it's very computer-centric not mobile-centric.

In Africa, mobile backhaul is going mostly satellite based using Google's upcoming EchoEye satellite.

Verne Global - Jeff Monroe, CEO; Tate Cantrell, CTO; Lisa Rhodes, VP Sales/Marketing

JM: We are bringing dual power 500 sq.m. datacentre to Keflavik, Iceland - it arrives in October. We covered negotiations on tax policy, power utilities, running cables to Iceland. First customer is DataPipe - services US and UK with management and cloud services. The cable was laid in 2009. This is the world's first mission critical data centre with zero-emissions to be manufactured and constructed in less than four months.

We got Icelandic tax law changed so that VAT could be refunded if equipment was deployed - ie this is in line with the rest of Europe. We had to install power and telecoms lines. The site is former NATO air base. Dual power source is geothermal and hydro - but we have diesel generators as backup - customers demand it just in case the Earth stops generating heat! Iceland has a very robust electricity supply because there is constant demand: there are a lot of aluminium smelters using big power - they use 85% of the total constantly so the whole varies little, unlike eg the UK.

DataPipe offers green services. We have multi-terabit cables that deliver point-to-point connectivity.

Customers save money because we don't add a green premium. We are a wholesale datacentre provider. We use COLT modular datacentres as the basis. We looked at lots of other modular datacentres and the plus point for COLT was our ability to collaborate.

There is not much waste heat: power cost and environmental impact are zero. So is PUE important? We quote the PUE to customers - have not yet announced it. we can do better than the COLT PUE: 1.21. The main energy cost is humidification, and inside the box temperature will be maintained to ASHRAE standards.

Do people care about green in a recession? There has to be a cash advantage, so the renewable part of this is a key advantage for us.

This is a 40-50 year investment so we think about things in long timescales. We know what the cost of electricity will be in 20 years time - no-one else can do that. The price we pay for electricity is under 50% - all other things being equal - compared to UK power cost.

Wellcome Trust is the majority investor.

About COLT: we see a strong demand in the colocation market and we required a partner who could provide highly resilient, flexible data centre space, configured to our specific technical requirements.

Infoblox - Steve Garrison, VP Marketing; Francisca Calkoen, EMEA Marketing

Preamble: the need for IP address management is growing as rates of change and the numbers of IP addresses increase. It means there's a need for automation, driven by trust of the system. (we do DDI=DNS, DHCP, IPAM) - it's a network provisioning control plane tool.

Our systems run as a grid so that they understand what's happening using a distributed database. It's a resilient network fabric. It means we can segment network services and the grid can get as big as you like.

New: the new product is Multi-Grid Master (MGM). You can install 50 grids, each of which has 250 devices = 12,500 devices. It's a virtual mainframe... Price: $25,000.

Brocade - John McHugh, Chief Marketing Officer

Customers are worrying about economic issues and technology ageing. Looking at Cisco's VCE - it's a Ford Model T. It achieved success through being limited but customisation came along. VCE is fine for a first step but it needs to be customised.

Brocade is about CloudPlex - the best systems (storage, computing, networking) need to get together. We worked with Avnet to build an integrated stack with twice the performance of VCE at the same price, with flexibility and an open architecture.

Cloud moves IT to opex not capex - IT used to be like building your own power plant but now you don't need to do that, you can acquire applications etc on a per-use model. This is transformational. You can even buy your networking on a subscription model with Brocade Network Subscription, announced at VMworld four weeks ago. This is appealing to those in the managed services business as they won't get cashflow positive until the second or third year. This is where resellers are going as it means they don't have capital charges. the proof is that MSPs are pressing other vendors to do likewise.

We designed Ethernet fabric chips after the acquisition of Foundry Networks, so our network fabric becomes a flexible hardware-based, lossless distributed switch chassis. It knows about the port configurations and topology. It means the system is multiply redundant. This is good for internal network traffic inside the datacentre - which is not what Cisco's Nexus architecture is designed for - it's designed for north/south traffic not east/west traffic.

Brocade Ethernet Fabric called VDX - we have 200 customers (60 in EMEA) for this - not big numbers but this is datacentre stuff - equivalent to Juniper QFabric. VDX is doing well: Q211 revenue for this up 78% Q311 up 119%. The system has Fibre Channel ports so it can link into existing storage networks.

Growth of cloud will be service providers and SIs building new datacentres not enterprises.

MEF – Kevin Vachon, COO and Phil Tilley, Global Marketing Co-chair

Kevin presented an impressive set of market data and predictions for further growth in Carrier Ethernet (CE) equipment and services. Vertical Systems Group’s recent report confirmed that the worldwide market for Business Ethernet services is on target to reach $44.3B by 2015 with double-digit global growth despite recent economic uncertainty.

Having just celebrated its 10^th anniversary, the MEF continues to gain momentum through its increasing membership and other initiatives, including an expansion of its successful certification program to include MEF – CECP’s – Carrier Ethernet Certified Professionals important new standards wok in the areas of access services and 4G mobile backhaul. MEF’s strategy for fully enabling Carrier Ethernet to support Private Cloud Computing also forms a major component of MEF’s current work plans.

The MEF is on track with important technical and educational work that will enable mobile operators to more easily implement MEF’s widely adopted Class of Service models in wireless backhaul environments, to drive down mobile backhaul costs. Also, with work nearing completion on the next generation of MEF’s Mobile Backhaul Implementation Agreement, mobile operators will be have the necessary technical guidance to now support both 3G and 4G.

Building on the Global Interconnect Program of 2010/11 significantly, MEF will be introducing a new access service specification in early 2012 that will standardize wholesale access service implementations and enable shortened cycles for the sale and provisioning of such services. This new area of work is seen as one of the final major puzzle pieces in support of Carrier Ethernet globalization.

Day two of NetEvents October 2011 press summit in Frascati opened with a set of meetings between vendors and press (more info in next blog), followed

2011-10-06T17:35:00.003+01:00

KEYNOTE: Joe Baguley, Chief Cloud Technologist, VMware.

The morning's keynote was delivered by Joe Baguley, chief cloud technologist from virtualisation software company VMware. Baguley talked about how virtualisation in the cloud will change how everyone works.

One of his main points was that in future the desktop operating system will be pulled apart as its various elements -- memory, disk and CPU -- are pushed into the cloud, and applications will be available anywhere on any device. This will remove the need for desktops, he said.

He also said we would also be seeing mobile virtual phones -- Android phones running another phone image -- very soon. Some corporates already do this with laptops so that one image is locked down and secured, designed for company usage, while the other is for personal use.

He was lightly grilled by the event host, Manek Dubash, who asked about the confusion that remains between cloud and virtualisation, the problems of over-reliance on unreliable networks, and Microsoft, VMware's biggest competitor.

HEAD 2 HEAD ‘Clash of the Titans' : Datacentre Architecture Shoot-Out

An entertaining session headed by Daniel Beazer, senior research analyst at Tier1 Research. Beazer played the role of an Australian media baron looking for pitches from cloud service providers, in the shape of Verizon Business's David Howarth and Brocade's John McHugh.

Howarth's pitch offered access anywhere, any time, any place, and to overcome the barriers of change, governance and trust. McHugh offered a flat, low-latency network which he said would allow capacity-based scaling. After a show of hands from the audience as to the more effective pitch (which McHugh narrowly won), two analysts played the role of consultants examining the two vendors' offerings. Keith Humphries (Eurolan) asked about legacy integration, while Rob Bamforth (QuoCirca) asked how the vendors planned to quantify existing assets.

After John McHugh declared systems integrators were going to be the road kill of the cloud, a final vote was taken, in which McHugh increased his margin of victory.

DEVIL’S ADVOCATE “Into the ether then into the cloud – the vital role of Ethernet”

Analyst James Eibisch from IDC was up next, and discussed the role of Ethernet in the cloud. For him, the question was whether high speed Ethernet can deliver at the core, and what benefit it brings to the cloud.

On the panel, Kevin Vachon of the MEF said that Ethernet will be critical to the cloud, while James Walker of Tata Communications said that cloud services are being taken up quickly as providers deploy Ethernet within and between their datacentres. McHugh said that Ethernet is great where appropriate, enlarged upon by Alcatel-Lucent's Phil Tilley who reckoned that Ethernet gives high bandwidth, secure and reliable services. Tilley added that Ethernet is ideal for known – i.e. not mobile -- locations. John McHugh added that it's not as simple as that as you can't just let people create and run their own Ethernet. It needs a multi-protocol architecture, he said.

After further discussion, Eibisch polled the audience, who agreed that Ethernet will be essential to cloud where its application makes sense.

Service Assurance with the Cloud. Rob Bamforth, Principal Analyst, Communication, Collaboration and Convergence, Quocirca

The summit's penultimate session was led by Rob Bamforth, principal analyst at QuoCirca, and concerned service assurance in the cloud. He asked the panel how much was needed.

Panel member Marco Wanders from Acision said that the cloud needed application performance, availability and security, with cloud access being the key reason for the network's existence. Available capacity will always be used, he said, so you need to classify traffic to allow SLA and prioritisation to work.

Vodafone's Tim Gigg said his company has a cloud offering for multinationals but that latency is an issue when selling to Asia-Pac and Africa. He agreed that quality of service is important, so Vodafone places content caches close to its base stations.

David Howarth, of Verizon Business, said you need to define the experience you want to have and work backwards from there. We will backhaul traffic to the best place to get it to the Internet but we need application developers to collaborate, he said.

Ahmedou Oul Ahmed Sidi, from Mauritel, said his company was still thinking about cloud. His concerns were how cloud technology will affect the operator value chain and the telco business model. He was also concerned about security, service creation, the cost of migration from legacy infrastructures, and whether quality of service in the cloud was good enough for financial transactions. We wait to be convinced, he said.

Improving Profitability & ROI for SPs. Michal Halama, Principal Analyst, Business Network IT Services, Current Analysis

The final panel of the day came courtesy of Michal Halama, principal analyst at Current Analysis. Entitled Show Me The Money, this session concerned service providers' business models. The key factors for service providers are timing, revenue, cost-saving, and investment, he said. They need to blend existing services with new cloud services, and customers need to perceive the value.

From the panel, Alessandro Canzian, of BT, said that the cloud is a hub containing services from a number of players. Developers need to be creative in finding new services and not worrying about servers, while systems integrators need to integrate the legacy and cloud worlds.

Matthias Nass, from telecoms equipment vendor ECI, said that broadband is commodity, price-driven, with lots of user churn. This means there is a need to enhance revenue streams with services such as security, managed bandwidth, and datacentre strategies, Nass said. He said that a successful cloud needs to be easy to use, offer comprehensive functionality, automatic service provision, and integration of relevant services. He was favour of net neutrality but said that it was an international regulatory issue.

Panel member Simone Bonnannini, from Interoute, said that the service provider's role is not just to sell the bricks of the cloud but houses – i.e. not just services but the cloud itself. He saw the cloud as a black box to solve customers' problems and that's the key to making money. The problem with getting money from over-the-top operators, he said, is that if there are multiple operators, one will offer free transport and the rest must follow.

Jim Machi of Dialogic said that the cloud is a sandbox to allow developers to build applications. The first applications are non-essential, such as fax services, he said, followed by unified communications and new mobile services such as video messaging/SMS, and mobile videoconferencing.

After further discussion, the panel concluded. This wrapped up the summit for members of the press, although service providers and analysts stayed on for further discussions.

NetEvents EMEA Press Summit in Frascati opened on 5 October, keynote speaker James Walker of Tata Communications

2011-10-05T13:13:00.006+01:00

NetEvents' press summit in Frascati opened on 5 October 2011 as the company's first event on the Italian mainland since 1999.

First on the cloud-focused agenda was keynote speaker James Walker of Tata Communications who spoke about the cloud behind the cloud -- or how cloud buyers need to consider the impact of the network and other services. During his keynote, Walker said that the cloud is complex and difficult to configure, as a result of which some customers are sticking with their old ATM point to point network because it works.

He was joined onstage by NetEvents editorial director Manek Dubash who asked him how cloud buyers could trust service providers who are reselling services from multiple partners, and how well providers can be trusted, given the uncertainty that exists over the size of the market.

This session was followed by Gartner VP Ian Keene, who introduced a plenary session on cloud infrastructure, security, transport and content delivery. Keene explained how the cloud had now passed Gartner's peak of inflated expectations and was heading for the trough of disillusionment, as negative press and disillusionment starts to appear. Keene said it means there are some questions to be asked/answered.

From the discussion panel, Steve Garrison from Infoblox talked about his company's VMware plugin with the aim of reducing the time to obtain an IP address. He said that the problem with optimising cloud is that it's about people, pipes, politics, and process, so savings come from automation.

Jeff Monroe of Verne Global said that his company had just built a datacentre in Iceland which offers free cooling without chillers. The problem is that people are putting servers in sub-optimal locations, such as city centres, he said.

Mattias Nass from ECI Telecom said that the big problem for cloud is the access networks which are giving users bandwidth problems. The challenges are who will pay for cloud services, opex and regulatory concerns. He pointed out that bandwidth is limited even in developed countries. The cost savings from the cloud mean no additional specialisation or spending on IT, especially in SMBs, he said.

Sean Larner of wireless company Xirrus was next onstage being interviewed by Manek Dubash, who was keen to understand how cloud and wireless fitted together. Larner said that the proliferation of devices in the enterprise as cloud access grows means there is demand for denser wireless networks. He said that the market will grow and that, as a vendor, branding the company as cloud-focused was important. He added that demand for wireless was already growing in a variety of areas, not just the executive suite.

Peter Hall, analyst with Ovum, introduced the next session which discussed self-service and auto-provisioning. Hall outlined how these were key questions for cloud implementations. Clouds are not automated, he said, and today we only have first generation services but you need end-to-end management and automation, and service providers who take responsibility to ensure applications actually work.

On the panel, Steve Garrison, Infoblox, said that what customers want is to stop fixing mundane processes and to automate, although this still needs to gain trust. Customers don't want to go to the public cloud because they don't know how to measure it, and they have no visibility of what's in there, he said.

Phil Tilley, Alcatel-Lucent, said that enterprises need a systems integrator to bring the various elements together to build a cloud solution. Service level agreements are a marketing gimmick unless you can measure it, he said, and that a key technique to prove application performance is deep packet inspection.

Andreas Stern, from testing company Spirent, said cloud providers need to partner. Discussing reliability, he pointed out that failover is an issue: even six nines (99.9999%) availability amounts to 52 minutes per year. Failover can even failover to the wrong network but, like a plane, you have to believe in the pilot and the technology. Defending the cloud will always be a challenge, he said.

That concluded the morning's proceedings, and the plenary broke up for individual meetings.

“IT’s All In The Clouds” – NetEvents EMEA Summit, Italy, promises less cloud hype and more cloud wisdom

2011-10-03T08:53:00.007+01:00

The hype around Cloud computing is “deafening”, according to this Summer’s

”Hype Cycle” report from the Gartner Group. From multinational consulting firms and systems integrators down to freelance consultants, they all claim a suite of cloud related services, and Gartner warns that such ”cloudwashing” risks accelerating the entire industry into a trough of disillusionment.

But it isn’t a simple case of a desperate IT industry struggling to make sales in a reluctant market, the push is equally felt within organisations. According to Gartner Group analyst Rolf Jester: "[CEOs] want to know that somebody knows about it and has thought about it properly and that there is a plan and the plan makes sense". The professional services sector has been swift to respond, with assessments of clients’ business needs and recommended roadmaps for adopting cloud technology, meanwhile vendors have piled in with a lot of highly persuasive material.

Indeed, Ovum research director Steve Hodgkinson says that there are now so many seminars and workshops being laid on that their target audience is feeling saturated: "Most people have got the general case on cloud computing and why it appeals – now they're looking for the reality of how it feels to actually do it...with the undercurrent being: how do you see through all the hype?" He believes users have more to learn from other users and on-the-ground insights. "There's very strong interest in interactive knowledge sharing… People want to sift through all this and talk to their peers about their experience.”

What’s true of the market applies equally to our industry. NetEvents has always discouraged its speakers from delivering off-the-shelf product pitches – and some find it hard to kick the habit – but the fact is that the true value of any NetEvents Summit comes from a real two-way sharing of ideas, and as much listening as speaking.

That’s what sets this week’s NetEvents EMEA Summit apart from the tide of Cloud promotion: it’s a real opportunity for the industry to lay aside the hype and practice listening – to each other and to a world-class lineup of panelists, analysts and IT visionaries.

Starting with James Walker from Tata Communications – the man responsible for the strategy, management and development of Tata’s massive VPN portfolio with over 3,000 Ethernet access nodes in 52 countries, direct MPLS services to 100 countries and managed extended access and network integration offerings in more than 190 countries – we look forward to a wealth of real world facts about the vital role of “The Cloud behind the Cloud”.

For the second day’s guest speaker we selected from The Next Web’s April list of the 25 most influential cloud computing voices Joe Baguley – Chief Cloud Technologist EMEA from virtualization masters VMware. And, among the analysts presenting we have top names including : Michal Halama, Principal Analyst, Business Network IT Services, Current Analysis; Ian Keene, Vice President, Gartner; James Eibisch, Research Director, EMEA Business Network Services, IDC; Camille Mendler, Principal Analyst, Informa; Peter Hall, Principal Analyst, Ovum; Rob Bamforth, Principal Analyst, Communication, Collaboration and Convergence, Quocirca; and Daniel Beazer, Senior Research Analyst, EMEA, Tier1 Research. Topics addressed include a challenge on the role of Ethernet, debate sessions on service assurance, network automation and datacenter architecture, and a “Quick Fire” opportunity for innovators to prove they have the means to boost SPs’ profitability and ROI.

Day three ends the conference session firmly positioned in the real world, with a series of short case studies from top service providers, including: Alessandro Canzian, Head of BT Global Telecom Markets (GTM) Italy; Tim Gigg, Head of International Transport Programmes, Vodafone Group; Tate Cantrell, CTO, Verne Global; and Akber Jaffer, Vice President Strategy, Colt Data Centre Services.

Gartner’s Rolf Jester sums up the current global situation by saying: "Visibility and awareness of cloud computing are very high – that doesn't mean that knowledge is very high, but that everybody is talking about it."

This week’s NetEvents EMEA Summit in Italy offers a golden opportunity to set that record straight.

So stay tuned for this week’s event reports from Manek Dubash, Editorial Director, NetEventsTV…

Amit Sinha Roy, TATA, NetEvents Keynote Presentation transcript

2011-04-13T14:01:00.004+01:00

View the entire transcript of Amit Sinha Roy's Keynote presentation at this URL:

http://www.netevents.org/events/binaries/Malaysia2011/Roy-Keynote-Q-and-A.pdf

John McHugh, Brocade - NetEvents Keynote presentation

2011-04-13T14:01:00.002+01:00

View the entire transcript of John McHugh's Keynote presentation at this URL:

http://www.netevents.org/events/binaries/Malaysia2011/JohnMcHugh_Keynote.pdf

Tata bets cloud strategy on SMEs

2011-04-07T19:14:00.001+01:00

Amit Sinha Roy, VP of marketing strategy at Tata Communications, told journalists and analysts at NetEvents' Asia Pacific conference in Langkawi, Malaysia, that the conglomerate giant was betting that enough small and medium-sized businesses in Asia would take up the company's cloud offerings to make Tata's investment in new datacentres profitable.

He was speaking to an audience of press, analysts and industry vendors. "Yes I have made a big bet in terms of our investment in infrastructure to deliver cloud. The growth is in smaller enterprises as they do need serious server computing for burst mode requirements, as much as large enterprises with their own datacentres. SMEs want to reduce capex," he said.

Tata has just launched two datacentres, one in Hyderabad and one in Singapore. Interviewed on stage by Informa analyst Camille Mendler, he said the company built two, not too far from each other to bring lower latency, to bring data inc-country,, and to help provide local support. "We have a public cloud strategy for large enterprises but there is a sweet spot in terms of services for SMEs," he said. "Singapore supports surrounding countries, including Malaysia, Hong Kong, Thailand and so on -- and they can pay in any currency," he said.

Roy said that addressing SMEs was expensive but worthwhile. "The typical company is one with enough IT maturity to provision a server is our likely target audience," he said. "Mid-sized companies might not have an IT department, and we can offer support and help."

In the Indian market, there are a lot of companies that do development work for other companies, there's a lot of those,"he said. "IT development is their business."

"But will that work outside India?" asked Mendler. "There will be a different customer base in every region - it's media and entertainment in some," said Roy.

"But telecom is a mass production model of digital goods but what you're doing is at odds with that," said Mendler. "Yes, but we have divisions to address different segments," said Roy.

Roy said that customers would experience no switching costs or penalties, so it would easy for customers to get out of Tata's service.

"Loyalty is earned by giving high quality service at an affordable cost - not being the cheapest with the latest technology in terms of performance reach and uptime - so it's down to customer experience and service level," he said.

Tata will also offer white label services at wholesale prices for third parties to resell, Roy said.

"Will it be profitable? We think so," he said.

Don't go cloud to save, says HP cloud boss

2011-04-07T18:57:00.001+01:00

Cost saving should not be the main reason for going into the cloud, according to Steve Dietch, VP of HP's Cloud infrastructure division.

Rather, said Dietch, who was speaking at NetEvents' Asia Pacific conference in Langkawi, Malaysia, enterprises should take it slow and steady, one step at a time. "Everyone wants to talk about cloud but what about security, performance, and management?," he said.

Dietch, who gave a closing keynote speech entitled Getting back to earth, told the audience of press, analysts and industry vendors that people will evolve to cloud at their own speed depending on the business case.

Dietch then talked about how HP was helping customers go to the cloud with its top to bottom datacentre offerings.

Interviewed on the stage by IDC analyst Tim Dillon after his keynote, Dietch said that infrastructure as a service is now very small while software as a service is fairly big, and business process as service is well-established. "Applications that aren't mission-critical or differentiating should go to the cloud," he said.

Asked how many customers would go to the cloud in the next few years, Dietch said that: "almost every enterprise customer will go there as a hybrid model. It will take a long time and it'll happen in a pragmatic, stepwise approach. It's a secular trend."

"The problems I've seen too often -- ten times in the last three months -- is companies too quickly move infrastructure into the cloud without time to improve its credibility, he said. "So my advice is to carve off something such as development and testing, do it fast and then move forward. One message: if you're going to screw it up, screw it up fast so you have time to recover the situation."

Clash of the titans

2011-04-07T10:48:00.001+01:00

The first day of NetEvents' Asia Pacific press summit in Langkawi, Malaysia, saw a clash of ideologies, as four major vendors went head-to-head over next generation datacentres, with the audience voting for the most convincing vendor.

At issue was the right approach to supplying datacentres with infrastructure for the cloud. One on one side sat Cisco and HP, both of which have developed a unified datacentre infrastructure that includes server, networking, storage and support, and on the other sat storage vendor Brocade and networking vendor Alcatel-Lucent.

Moderating the debate was analyst Tim Dillon, AVP Research at IDC. Dillon opened by noting that the priorities for enterprise CIOs are to take out costs, align IT to the business, and manage risks. He said that businesses look at IT assets on basis of business not technology and that, increasingly, the CFO takes decisions relating to game-changing technologies such as virtualisation, not the CIO.

The four vendors then each made a short opening pitch, starting with Rotem Salomonovitch, CTO IP Solutions at Alcatel-Lucent. He said the question needed to be asked whether network infrastructures are ready for the cloud, and that the cloud was about the enterprise moving to a carrier world and "shifting their stuff into the cloud". It was about extending the network into the datacentre, he said.

John McHugh, chief marketing officer for Brocade was next. He said there was "no such thing as a single vendor datacentre". The datacentre needs to be open and multi-vendor, that it supports the utilisation of millions of dollars of investment in equipment, and needs to simplify the deployment of business applications. "And it must be non-stop," he said.

Bernie Trudel, Cisco's Cloud CTO spoke next. He said that the goal was a single architecture focused on IT service agility via innovation. "It's about an open interoperable architecture," he said. Cisco shows innovation on the supply and demand side, with cloud services on the supply side, and the process of how IT buys services on the demand side, he said.

Steve Dietch, speaking on behalf of HP as the company's VP cloud infrastructure, said that datacentres are expensive, siloed, and complex. "Eighty percent of cost is just keeping the lights on," he said. "We want to converge those services -- servers, network, power and cooling, facilities management -- and we are only vendor that can do this with our own intellectual property," he said. HP is still open with customer choice and orchestration and application lifecycle management plus security as priorities, Dietch said.

The audience, consisting of press, analysts and vendors, was then asked to vote on which pitch was best. Brocade's McHugh topped the poll; vendors did not vote.

The four vendors then discussed how enterprises could best improve their datacentres.

McHugh said: "Datacentre managers are having problems with the complexity of managing the virtualised, orchestrated infrastructure -- it's overwhelming their staff. They want it but they need to get opex costs out."

Salomonovitch said: The business group worries about how to make money in cloud, but techies have the problem of implementing it."

Bernie Trudel said: "We put together architectures that work and have the testing evidence and support. It keeps customers' options open because we use different partners."

Dietch said: "We are heterogeneous and open. We will swap any component of our converged infrastructure out if the customer wants it. We are converged so you only have a single vendor to talk to. Partnerships mean vendors break rank and talk about their own interests."

McHugh said: "Customers are looking for turnkey solutions but that's temporary. Ultimately, people want simplified deployment, and they want best of breed."

He added that IT people who focus on the technology not the information rather than the value to the organisation had the most to lose in the new cloud market.

Asked if enterprises would have to re-tool their networks, Salomonovitch said: "Service providers have been transforming their networks into converged infrastructures over the last seven years. The next transformation is to flatten the network and pay attention to mobility, and multiple layers of storage and connectivity."

Asked about how enterprises get to the virtualised future, Trudel said: "We show them how they can do it themselves. Not all applications will go to the cloud but there's a lot of low hanging fruit."

Then the panel agreed that security was the biggest problem for the cloud.

Analysis: there's no killer app for LTE

2011-04-07T01:44:00.002+01:00

It's easy to get excited about the latest whizz-bang technology but, if industry analyst Matt Walker from research company Ovum is to be believed, LTE -- next-generation mobile technology -- won't be here for years, and even when it does, the benefits might be smaller that you would expect.

LTE (or Long Term Evolution) is now officially the next generation of mobile wireless technology: 4G. The industry holds out promises of a DSL-style experience on your phone with up to 100Mbps. But Walker, who was speaking at NetEvents' Asia Pacific conference in Langkawi, Malaysia, told the audience of press, analysts and industry vendors, that Ovum's analysis found that there will be few direct benefits for mobile users from LTE for some considerable time.

Real-world data speeds are more likely to be in the region of 20Mbps, according to Walker. And instead of LTE, the big growth area will be HSPA+, which uses 3G foundations to deliver theoretical speeds of up to 84Mbps -- almost as much as LTE's headline figure.

"There's no killer application for LTE", Walker said. The main benefits of 4G accrue to the mobile operators, and include a cut in costs because of better spectrum efficiency, a simpler network architecture, the use of all-IP technology, and what he called a self-organising network.

In other words, LTE will enable operators to cope with the data tsunami that they're experiencing as a result of the huge take-up of smartphones. Walker predicted that the operators' revenues will increase by 9 percent annually to 2015 while data volumes will grow by 92 percent over the same period.

There's an irony here: operators sold the idea that users could get as much data as they liked, anywhere, any time but didn't expect people actually to take up the offer. The smartphone is the fastest growing category of mobile device and they're all sucking large volumes of data, which the operators' networks were not designed to deliver and they're cracking under the strain.

However, said Walker, LTE will help to fix that problem by making the operator's networks more efficient but "it will take time and money", and "it will be hard for operators to charge more for faster speeds as user expectations have been conditioned by DSL." As a result, he said, the operators will experience "no new revenues as a result of LTE".

Another pothole on the road to LTE is handset availability. Problems yet to be fixed are battery life, aerial integration and size, none of which bring an LTE handset into the handy form factor to which we have become accustomed.

Despite that, we will, said Walker, see data-only LTE-compatible handsets arriving late in 2011, with both voice and data devices arriving in 2012 -- but they're likely to be chunky.

Despite the problems, Walker said that in the real world, some contracts already gone live.

Although so unenthusiastic an assessment of LTE is rare, the picture painted by Walker was entirely believable.

As Mehmet Balos, marketing manager for telco network equipment vendor Genband, said in a panel discussion after Walker's presentation, while standards body GSMA has launched specifications for voice over LTE, "no-one's tearing down revenue-earning networks today". In the meantime, noted Balos, "revenues from voice and SMS are paying the bills for the data explosion."

Cloud computing a fundamental change, says industry visionary

2011-04-06T13:03:00.000+01:00

Cloud computing is a fundamental change unlike any other, according to Brocade's chief marketing officer John McHugh.

McHugh was giving the opening keynote speech at NetEvents' conference in Langkawi, Malaysia, in front of press and analysts from the Asia Pacific region.

McHugh said that in 20 years time, computing will have changed as much as manufacturing has changed over the last 20 years. He said: "Who would have imagined 20 years ago that almost all technology manufacturing would have been moved to huge factories in China, to companies such as Selectronics and Foxconn?".

McHugh talked about the impetus behind the adoption of cloud computing. A key driver is the desire to buy computing like a utility, on a per-transaction basis, so that the hardware becomes irrelevant. The roadmap goes from server virtualisation, to distributed virtualisation, then private, hybrid, and then "fully transactable" public cloud as the end point, he said

"A classic early phase of this process is to deliver a cloud in a box," he said, referring to all-in-one offerings from vendors such as HP and Cisco. "It's a step back from an IT standpoint, and involves restrictive architectures -- you have to use this or that storage and OS. It simplifies deployment but cloud deployers won't want that model. They are gap fillers, transient products."

McHugh said that a network fabric was the next step towards the cloud. Brocade sells storage network fabrics, which are flat, highly-connected, non-hierarchical systems.

"The next step is to move to fabrics with high performance, service provider networks that can connect datacentres together, globally," he said. "Meshing architectures allows for example Openflow to create self-learning networks.

"Every datacentre wants to be a service provider, and every SP wants to be a datacentre. It means SPs are not a route for one place to another but a destination."

For McHugh, one of the biggest challenges is improving cloud security. "It's the stickiest challenge," he said. "Open is critical, along with security, which needs a guarantee that shared resources are safe and secure."

McHugh said the solution was governmental regulation, as this would mean companies could trust service providers as security failures could incur legal penalties. "Government needs to support the idea that recompense can be had if services are not delivered," McHugh said. "Better security will enable the move from a private to a distributed model."

Data sovereignty was another key issue that, without legislation, would hinder cloud adoption.

"Do people care where their data is being hosted? Yes, data sovereignty is important," he said. "Most companies are at the private cloud stage now, so they define both ends and understand what's in the [datacentre] cage. People only don't care where the data is unless the data doesn't matter, and it will be that way until regulatory changes occur."

What cloud also needs is a unified standard, according to McHugh, along with more innovation.

"Innovation drives new business models that drive up consumption. What dies is old technologies and companies that fixate on how things are done rather than the outcome," he said.

Network reliability key to cloud success, says industry analyst

2011-02-10T15:45:00.002Z

The cloud will be a huge trend, said Clive Longbottom, service director at analyst firm Quocirca, but only if the network become more reliable. He was introducing a debate on cloud issues in front of an audience of European journalists at NetEvents in Barcelona.

The problem for cloud providers is that they can only guarantee service levels for the areas of the network that they control, said Longbottom. However, they have no control over the network fabric when their traffic transits the Internet, he said. "There's lots of unknown unknowns," he said. He said that operators can recoup some control using WAN optimisation, protocol tunnelling, application tuning, deduplication and compression.

The consensus of the panel, which included representatives from easynet, Verizon Business, Infoblox, Genband and Spirent was broadly in agreement that organisations need to build their own networks if they need deterministic performance, while the Internet was good enough for most purposes.

"You need to put up with the Internet's vagaries so if you want a better network, build it privately," said Justin Fielder, CTO, easynet. "You just need to explain the issues to the customer."

David Howorth, regional vice-president at Verizon Business agreed, and Jeff Schmitz, vice president networks & applications at Spirent said: "You need to choose which business applications you want to run over the network."

There followed a discussion of where intelligence, such as security logic, needed to be located in the network fabric, with agreement reached that the edge was the best place.

LTE is solution to mobile video, say experts

2011-02-10T15:29:00.002Z

LTE will be solution to tomorrow's demand for mobile video, according to experts gathered at NetEvents in Barcelona. today. Speaking in front of an audience of European journalists, Mehmet Balos, chief marketing office for technology vendor Genband, gave a keynote speech win which he provided statistics for the growth of video, and the decline of voice traffic over mobile networks.

He said that market research showed the growth of Netflix with 15m subscribers, as well as Google, Amazon, and iTunes, who all provide video, will stress today's networks. The answer, said Balos, is LTE, or 4G mobile technology. "It is embraced by everyone, it's based on open standards based, and it's pure IP," he said. "There will be 50 billion devices connected to wireless networks, and data is already doubling every year."

The keynote speech was followed by a debate panel chaired by analyst Dean Bubley, founder of Disruptive Analysis. Bubley said that voice is the biggest problem for LTE. However, said Bubley, IP multimedia subsystem (IMS), which is the telecommunications industry's favoured technology for delivering video and voice, is "the dead parrot nailed to the perch of LTE" which could slow down the adoption of LTE.

Bubley's panel, which included Balos as well as Phil Tilley of Alcatel Lucent and Nigel Wright from Spirent Communications, disagreed. "IMS will be crucial for mobile operators," said Balos.

They went on to describe how LTE differs from existing 3G and HSPA-based networks.

MEF to certify Ethernet professionals

2011-02-10T12:51:00.000Z

The Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) announced the expansion of its certification programme to journalists at NetEvents in Barcelona today.

The MEF is introducing a Carrier Ethernet professional certification programme for individuals in the telecoms industry. It certifies expertise in Carrier Ethernet technologies, standards, services and applications, said the MEF.

The MEF certification programme was launched in 2005, and verifies that equipment and service providers conform to standardised specifications. The MEF described the certification programme as the telecoms industry’s reference for Carrier Ethernet excellence. The new extension allows the MEF to certify individuals who possess a baseline of Carrier Ethernet knowledge, making it easier to identify experts in the field, said the MEF.

The MEF and other certification providers will award certification to individuals who pass tests developed by leaders and experts in the Carrier Ethernet industry. The MEF is currently authorising organisations to offer training courses that prepare individuals to pass the exams.

According to the MEF, it's suited to product and technical marketing managers, pre-sales and application engineers, product planners and technically oriented sales professionals. To pass, individuals will face a written exam covering Carrier Ethernet technology and service fundamentals from an applications perspective.

If they do, they'll be awarded an official certificate and be listed in a directory of MEF certified professionals, posted on the MEF and EthernetAcademy.net websites.

MEF COO Kevin Vachon said at NetEvents: "MEF's equipment and services certification programmes have experienced broad industry acceptance and are an important enabler of the standardisation and globalisation of Carrier Ethernet. With extensive Carrier Ethernet infrastructure now in place, the CECP program targets technical sales and marketing professionals that are key to monetising these assets with new services and accelerating growth in our industry."

The new MEF programme is currently in the pilot phase with general availability scheduled for the second quarter of this year. Authorised training providers will also be announced in that quarter as well.

Spirent launches new mobile network testbed

2011-02-10T11:49:00.001Z

Jeff Schmitz, vice president, Networks & Applications group at Spirent. Communications told journalists at NetEvents in Barcelona today about its new test product TestCenter HyperMetrics neXt. The product helps carriers and equipment vendors test data and application workloads on the mobile Internet, according to Schmitz.

Customers include service providers those with networks accessed by millions of mobile and fixed subscribers using a variety of devices while delivering a high quality of service, said Spirent. Examples include FIFA World Cup, Olympic Games and other major world events, which can generate large pulses in video streaming and multimedia applications to mobile devices. HyperMetrics neXt allows carriers can test their networks' ability to deliver these services, according to the company.

“As carriers prepare for the exponential growth in traffic across the mobile Internet they have to guarantee enough data capacity as well as application performance” said David Emberley, research manager, Telecommunication Infrastructure at IDC. “Carriers and equipment vendors need to invest in solutions that validate performance and scale of the mobile Internet to ensure quality of experience”

Spirent claimed that HyperMetrics neXt, when combined with Spirent TestCenter Cloud Core architecture, is the highest-performing and most scalable and energy efficient solution available for testing networks and applications. The Intel-powered product allows test engineers to validate support for more advanced services for more subscribers, to maximise return on investment and utilisation of test resources, and to expand test coverage without expanding test equipment footprint, reckoned the company.

Spirent said that its Cloud Core architecture allows the HyperMetrics neXt to optimise testing tasks, using parallel processing and pooling of resources across unlimited numbers of test ports. Spirent said that test beds built on the Cloud Core architecture provide scalable performance and realism, and enable the testing of complex converged IP systems, such as cloud datacentres and 3G/4G/LTE mobile networks.

"Applications such as Facebook, YouTube as well as streaming videos can have a major impact on the mobile Internet." said Schmitz. "To deliver these services, carriers need to ensure performance from the cloud datacentre, through the mobile broadband network to the application on a wide range of user devices. Spirent’s new solution is specifically designed to accurately measure performance of the mobile Internet with realism at scale."

Accedian heads for growth

2011-02-10T11:35:00.002Z

Accedian Networks' vice-president of marketing, Craig Easley, told journalists at NetEvents in Barcelona today that his company was set for growth, having negotiated a $19 million round of funding in August 2010, and was experiencing high levels of growth.

The company makes hardware that allows mobile network operators to monitor, measure and manipulate traffic between its base stations and the rest of the network.

Its products include the MetroNID which Accedian recently upgraded to add clock synchronisation. This feature uses a GPS-derived clock signal to synchronise the cellular network and the MetroNIDs deployed in the base stations to an accuracy of five microseconds or batter, depending on how they are deployed.

"We do network monitoring that can be installed at the base station and test the network's performance," said Easley. "Network operators can measure ongoing performance to check that the access network provider is delivering on service level agreements. We use metrics such as one-way latency, jitter -- changes in packet delay -- and frame loss. Those four metrics allow you to compute service availability."

"We've also recently added patented technology that gives the operator the ability to measure the performance of a live network by only measuring using the network's unused bandwidth."