Technologies that drive the customer experience

In Business Madison Article

What a Great Story by Joe Vanden Plas on the use of technologies to drive customer experience.  I was a speaker at the Fusion CIO http://fusion2016.com/ conference in March.  There were so many people discussing and debating technologies which are transforming business.  Joe captures a great viewpoint around how companies are turning the tables on the traditional models for IT.  

Please check out their website, lots of great content and all very well written.

Cheers,

Eric

Meeting customer expectations increasingly means leveraging new technologies that help serve customers and enhance their experience with you.

Technologies like software-defined WANs (wide area networks), also known as next-generation WAN, is said to be “turning the tables” on traditional data carriers and putting negotiating leverage in the hands of consumers. One of the people saying that is Eric Ludwig, team leader of cloud aggregation services for CDW, the Vernon Hills, Ill.-based provider of technology products and services. We recently spoke to Ludwig about technological developments that will help businesses enhance that all-important customer experience.

Fan of SD-WAN

From the standpoint of putting power in the hands of consumers, software-defined WAN (aka SD-WAN) is definitely a business play, not a pitch for individual consumers. SD-WAN, a way to deploy a wide area network and manage it via software, is now being pitched to business customers that traditionally purchase wide area networks to offer services to their user community, whether it’s internal or external.

According to Ludwig, the high-level advantages of software defined WAN is much greater reliability, greater costs savings, and faster monetization. There are a number of technical benefits that may not be relevant for a company’s user community, but things like the ability to accelerate and the ability to bypass are increasingly important for overcoming global Big Brothers. For example, Ludwig notes that in China it’s very difficult to run networks because the Chinese government inspects every packet.

“Their suspicion of American or domestic providers is much higher than their suspicion of others,” Ludwig states. “There are ways to utilize these technologies to accelerate web services out of China. Air China is a company that uses software-defined networking in order to serve their e-commerce content to companies outside of China.”

Ludwig explains that cloud computing is shifting expenses in many cases from CapX or capital expenditures to OpX or operational expenditures, and it’s getting third parties to provide some or all of your management. Where he sees SD-WAN being different, but still equally as disruptive, is that the technologies are changing.

In the past, “service providers are traditionally just selling transport, connectivity between A and B, and there is not a lot of intelligence to it,” he notes. “There is some minimal intelligence that’s provided but effectively we’re going to give you a private highway from A to B and we’re going to charge you x-amount of dollars.”

Access providers that have the traditional types of delivery services only use certain off ramps and on ramps, and they are fixed. It may be an access provider in a particular market that only offers one type of technology while a competing access provider may offer multiple types of technologies at a lower cost. “That’s one piece,” he says. “It’s the ability to use the wire that’s most ubiquitous, irrespective of who that overarching data network or highway provider is.”

Fast-forward to SD-WAN and the next-generation networks feature the ability for customers to utilize intelligence that’s inherent in the networks, and as a result they can purchase lower-cost services. There was a time when the only acceptable transfer technology for most businesses was MPLS (multiprotocol label switching), which is a privately routed highway for businesses to send traffic. “What we’re now finding is that with the software intelligence at the core of many of these providers, or at the edge in the case of Cisco Systems and many other hardware providers, you have the ability to buy lower-cost Internet circuits,” Ludwig says. “You’re able to use multiple connections and the intelligence around how patterns and traffic are moved to achieve what is a very similar if not better performance metric than a traditional MPLS or wide area network.”

Gartner Inc., the information technology research company, estimates that SD-WAN has less than a one percent market share today, but many believe it’s only a matter of time before it becomes a market driver. Rather than fight the inevitable, Ludwig says telecommunications companies are already getting into this space, and the way most of them are doing it is by selling Cisco’s technology and parking it in their own networks. Cisco is considered the market leader for “on-premise” networks or for customers who want to own and capitalize and manage their own networks. The Bay Area tech firm recently put a package together its calls IWAN, which stands for intelligent wide area network, and it includes a number of technologies it has long had available but never packaged together.

With Cisco, you have to own their equipment with their software in order to run it, but there also are software-defined providers that allow you to simply purchase a circuit to the Internet and then they layer on the intelligence and other components that make them “next-generation.” So while there are different delivery methods, Ludwig says many telecommunications providers see it as a defensive play in order to retain telecommunications revenue.

“They will propose that they manage Cisco’s device and then provide different technologies off the edge of that device,” he states. “I think what’s coming, and I know for certain that it is because I’m talking to many of these providers at a high level, is they are building into their core networks a lot of the intelligence that already exists among the software-as-a-service players, or the cloud-based, next-generation WAN providers.

“So they are taking what Cisco has invested in hardware and they are beginning to invest in the core of their own networks in order to provide these services natively to their customers.”

At your service

Ludwig also identified three “as-a-service” technologies that are already being used to drive the customer experience.

1. Platform as a service. Some of the biggest entrepreneurial success stories in recent memory have been technology platforms like Facebook, Google, and Amazon. It’s becoming more popular in the general cloud space, and CDW is beginning to see more customers looking for platform-as-a-service. It permits them to provision an entire workflow of software and infrastructure to bring products to market faster, to ensure that software applications are up to date, and to take high-valued IT resources and focus them on developing technologies that can give them a competitive advantage, rather than rely on repeatable processes that are required in order to bring products to market. “Say you need a big data analytics program to predict what somebody can buy,” Ludwig says. “Instead of building that entire workflow, we’re finding that customers are hitting a button and it automatically provisions. They get their product to market faster, which generally means more margins, less cost, or more innovation in the applications.”
2. Unified communication as a service. This is for businesses that want one interface — a phone on their desk and their computer — and that same software set on their iOS or Android device. “We see customers who want access to their communications platforms no matter where they are and no matter what device they use,” Ludwig states. “We’re seeing more and more customers adopting a hosting strategy for their unified communications.”
3. Disaster recovery as a service. In the “old days” companies ran the same application in two different places to ensure recovery to another system. That model has turned upside down. Now if they make a disaster declaration, they pay a “deductible” and run their critical systems on infrastructure provided by that service provider. “It’s less of a ‘build another house model’ and it’s more about ‘let me buy an insurance policy,’” Ludwig explains. “There is another submarket in cloud services today that is providing this to customers for a nominal fee based on the amount of space and horsepower that customer may need.”