An Intelligent Services Framework within the Network

The requirements for delivering employee and customer applications have never been more similar. Largely due to mobile working, the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) movement and the webification of the data center, organizations are forced to deliver internal employee applications with similar delivery demands as required for external facing customer applications. With a broad range of devices to support and varying connectivity profiles, they must deliver access from anywhere and on any device securely, fast & always available, 24 hours a day.

And the landscape for enterprises hosting customer facing applications and services has also changed. Competition has raised consumer expectations demanding improvement over generic, one-size-fits-all architectures and programming methodologies.

Competition, internally between IT Departments and Software-as-a-Service providers, and externally, between competing organizations, is driving a review of not just what applications are being delivered but, more importantly, how. But longstanding has been the disconnect between data center networking and the way in which applications & services are consumed. Customers have always had the right to choose and will exert that right by taking their business elsewhere when expectations are not met. And this right to choose now also extends to employees. The term ‘consumer’ must now be redefined to include colleagues.

And in a time of high expectations, where consumer’s desire for ‘instant gratification’ reigns, organizations can ill afford to allow application errors, performance related issues and security shortfalls, however severe or temporary, to impact service delivery.

The Network must lose its rigidity and in place provide an Intelligent Services Framework delivering a service-to-consumer oriented view of application delivery. The Network must focus on the expectations of those consuming services.

There is no way to manage mobile device and application growth simultaneously without an Intelligent Services Framework, a broker between the users and applications providing:

• Application Awareness: Total insight into how the application is supposed to look on the wire.
• User Awareness: Ability to see which users are trying to access what application from which devices.
• Resource Awareness: Tying all pieces of the application delivery infrastructure together to provide real-time visibility into the entire Application Delivery Network

The Internet and its resources are free and open. And, like in nature, its applications and services fight for alpha-status in a battle of survival-of-the-fittest. An Intelligent Services Framework within the network wins that battle.

John Gage said it best when he coined the phrase, "The network is the computer".