Innovation will characterize the growth of ICT

By Akin Banuso

Enterprise Business Manager of Dell, Mr. Akin Banuso has said that the rise of open standards, frameworks and architectures, and a shift from proprietary models will give way to new solutions with regards to networking in the Nigerian business landscape. He highlighted three networking paradigms that are shaping the business landscape across the world today.

According to Banuso, ‘the three networking paradigm shaping the industry are; convergence, distributed networking and software defined networks. These topics are not new to the table, but having been discussed for some time, they are now beginning to hit the mainstream in terms of the maturity of the technology and where they are on the corporate agenda’’.

The first of these ‘Networking Big3’ shapers of the industry is Convergence. Banuso explains that ‘’It’s not wholly a networking issue but its impact on the way networks are managed and – just as importantly – who manages them, should not be underestimated. Previously IT functioned in silos, with server, storage and network admins going about their business relatively independently. When someone within the organisation wanted a new resource provision, working across these silos to make that happen could be a painful and unnecessarily cumbersome experience’’ he said.

Software defined networking, is the next of the ‘Networking Big3’. Although the technology is still in its infancy, software defined networking (SDN) is widely touted to revolutionise network infrastructures on the same scale as virtualization in the server market. Traditional networking has been unable to offer the flexibility that networking managers require today

Distributed networking is another Big3 networking shaper of industry. There is a shift from traditional to distributed architectures; several developments have rendered the traditional centralised, monolithic chassis-switched network unfit for the modern business’ requirements. ‘The workforce has become extremely disperse and mobile,  virtualization and cloud computing has resulted in much higher server-to-server traffic flow than before.