As another financial year ends, I would like to take some time to reflect and understand what was top of mind for customers around me. I find the following 5 topics below were common themes and will continue to take mind share into the next few years.

Multi-Cloud Strategy

I remember when people were looking up what cloud meant. Then there was a full transition to double down on public cloud. Some organisation even mandate all projects be cloud first. After a few iterations, I believe the sweet spot is hybrid cloud. Organisations can not get away from the benefits of control and pricing of private cloud but still need to leverage the agility and scalability of public cloud. However, with 3 key major public clouds, the possibility of multi-cloud resonates strongly. Allowing customer to have choice and flexibility to leverage the best cloud for their applications. Therefore a great multi-cloud strategy/solution will be able to provide consistent policy and governance across all clouds. Be able to shift workload back(hard to do) and forth without rebuilding applications. I really look forward to see how this all plays out.

WAN Strategy

I believe in the next 5 years all organisation have either gone SDWAN or not. It is a perfect time to evaluate your WAN foot print as nbn rollout is coming to an end. 4G is a viable carriage and there is so much hype around 5G. Therefore customer do not have a strong dependencies on MPLS and can meet their applications carriage needs via other means. In addition, customers will see benefits of moving away from a centralised security and services model and be able to push these capabilities to the edge. Gaining benefits from a distributed architecture such as scale and lowering latency but still able to centralised manage these constructs via policy. So if you do not have a sound WAN strategy or not looking at SDWAN, it is a great time to start these conversations.

Cloud Managed and Cloud Tethered

I can see operators and security cringing reading that sub heading. As more networks and management system are now in the cloud or cloud tethered. Organisation are gaining many advantages from this transition such as: simplify infrastructure, easier software provisioning, plug and play, visibility and ability to feed that data into AI/ML for deeper insights. However I see alot of people are afraid to take this leap. Honestly, it took me a while to unchain myself from legacy methods but now understanding these solution intimately, I can see the light. So I recommend operation and security stakeholders to challenge themselves, before opting for the legacy way.

Customer Analytics and Engagement

As IT departments become cost centres and forced into budget cuts, can we still make them relevant to the top line? Looking at the Network as a Sensor, I believe there is a lot of data that can assist with better customer engagement. One great example is WIFI analytics which can highlight customer movements in a store, provide trend analysis and be able to administer personalised engagements via mobile applications. Furthermore, these concept can be applied to Camera as a Sensor with the addition of a recognition engine for high level profiling. This data set can be imported into a CRM tool to strengthen omnichannels strategies. However with all this data from many different sources, there needs to be a platform that can correlate, remove noise and build a enriched data set which allows for actionable insights. I feel there is currently a gap in the market for an innovative system integrator to build this platform and gain this competitive edge.

All You Can Eat

Since everything is supposedly software driven and have a subscription component, I am starting to see the rise of Enterprise Agreements (EA). EA are an awesome way to consume solutions at a lower price point while unlocking other capabilities. Depending on the EA constructs there is inbuilt growth and true forward for budget protection. From an operations view, EA makes provisioning and management of licenses straightforward. There is usually an online portal that can generate a license and simply be attached to a node. So no dependencies on Bill of Materials, purchase orders, delivery times and endless emails of license keys. I highly suggest, that this commercial construct should be explored at the next life cycle management event.

Summary

I hope this blog post has highlighted some interesting topic for you to think about over the next financial year. If you are already on these journey or feel there are other top of mind subjects, please share them below.