Networking technology for SMEs |
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| Technology | |
| Written by Charlie Kawwas, Vice President of Marketing, NCG, LSI Corporation | |
| Tuesday, 06 January 2009 | |
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Today’s SME (defined by research giant IDC as firms with fewer than 1,000 employees) faces a host of business challenges, including the ever-growing need for advanced voice and data communications capabilities. This article discusses the emergence of the Multi-service Business Gateway (MSBG) and the role it has to play in offering SMEs and Enterprise remote branch offices a converged, efficient and cost-effective way to coordinate these services.The Internet has undoubtedly increased the speed at which organisations need to act and do business in order to remain competitive, and more often than not SMEs find themselves facing head-on competition against larger enterprises in order to attract and retain an increasingly demanding customer-base. While this increased competitive climate is driving SMEs to adopt enterprise grade technologies and remote offices to have service access similar to headquarters, perhaps of even greater significance is the growing interest in sharing high-speed, secure Internet access and gaining access to advanced capabilities. Never has the requirement for network-based services been so great (or more diverse) and the demand for access to, transport and storage of media-rich content has reached new heights. SMEs typically rely on a variety of devices to gain access to voice and data resources and often deal with disparate access appliances to ensure access to their communications capabilities. When adopting new technology solutions, however, SMEs remain price-sensitive and demand high return on investment from any technology solution implemented. Businesses of this size do not implement technology for technology’s sake but rather to address a direct business need. According to IDC, while SMEs spend as much as 5-10% of their annual revenues on IT, for a firm with less than £1 million in annual revenue, this may only equate to £50,000. Considering that this must cover all hardware, software and IT services, setting strict IT priorities and sticking to them is imperative to the survival of the business. Furthermore, SMEs do not always have the necessary in-house IT skills to analyse or implement technology solutions. The priority for the SME is to focus on its core business and deliver bottom-line value. IT decision-making, while important, is not a key business driver even though SMEs understand that successfully implemented IT can deliver enhanced business benefits. SMEs can be limited to IT solutions that are ‘scaled down to fit’. Vendors regularly adopt a one size fits all approach without taking into consideration that an SME has very different business needs as opposed to an enterprise client. As a consequence, aspects such as performance, functionality, future-proofing or cost may be compromised. Often SMEs do not have the necessary space to host their own data centres which is often combined with a limited ability to provide an optimal environment required for a networking infrastructure. Networking technology vendors are working to meet these challenges faced by SMEs and have developed a solution that places all the critical network functions into a single box. The result is the Multiservice Business Gateway (MSBG), a device that combines functions such as routing, firewall, intrusion detection, anti-spam, IP voice and management functions in a single platform and promises to be the answer that SMEs (and remote offices) have been looking for. The device also provides access to the Wide Area Network (WAN) with multiple uplink choices and includes an array of Ethernet LAN ports including PoE (Power over Ethernet) ports for VOIP terminals, surveillance cameras, remote wireless access points and other Ethernet enabled devices. It also supports analogue telephony systems to ensure compliance with emergency voice communications requirements and FAX machine capability. By combining all the networking functionality in a single box, not only does the MSBG make the purchase of hardware necessary to deploy world-class Internet connectivity more affordable, but more importantly, simplifies deployment and management of these services for SMEs and branch offices. The global MSBG market is expected to grow at an impressive 30% annually until at least 2011, with attendant revenue climbing from a nominal $1billion to as much as $2.5 billion by 2011. The concept of an MSBG is a relatively new one and is the tangible realisation of the new ’philosophy’ of convergence. However, since the ‘perfect storm’ of widespread broadband access full function mobility and increasingly capable silicon came to pass, device manufacturers have engaged in an ongoing redesign of the MSBG to ensure that its capabilities and feature set evolved in lockstep with the increasingly complex demands of the market. One of the most prominent benefits of MSBG deployment in a network is overall simplification, followed by the attendant reduction in cost. The ability of a service provider to replace multiple heterogeneous devices with a single multifunction box is a compelling argument. The expanded service profile is also compelling argument for MSBG deployment; not only does the device pave the way for the delivery of converged voice, data and video streams, it also opens the door for hosted applications, entertainment content delivery, support for user-generated content and supply chain applications. Comments (0)
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