What Can SDN Do for You? – Level 3's Saenger

Planning your work and working your plan is a good start to an SDN strategy, according to Adam Saenger, vice president of global product developments and management at Level 3 Communications.

However, that strategy is not complete without a good governance framework that addresses cultural issues like FUD [fear, uncertainty and doubt] and personal responsibility.

Previously, in Part I of this conversation, Saenger talked about enterprise customers' needs for good talent and network carrier's needs for customer collaboration when it comes to SDN success. Then, in Part II, Saenger waded into the beginning of the SDN journey. (See Level 3's Saenger: SDN Takes a Village and Level 3's Saenger: SDN a Gateway to Automation.)

In this final installment, Saenger completes the discussion with advice on how to properly evaluate an SDN deployment from multiple angles while also dealing with the cultural shifts necessary for successful digital transformations.

Telco Transformation: If I am an enterprise entrenched in legacy IT -- or even early-stage hybrid IT -- and I want to deploy SDN, what's at the top of my checklist of things to do?

Adam Saenger: I would ask yourself: What are you looking to get out of SDN?

Let me actually back up and say that if you're looking for SDN to solve your ability to adapt your changing business environments, you need to ask yourself:

• "What are my goals?"
• "Does my business thrive on turning new services up and down quickly?"
• "Does my business thrive on changing my existing services on a rapid basis?"
• Does my business thrive on the movement of data between data centers or the dissemination of data between a data center, the cloud and enterprise locations?

TT: If I were to deploy an SDN solution, and then a year later, it's just not doing that much for me by way of agility or ROI or efficiency, what have I fundamentally got wrong in my organization?

AS: What we saw customers doing wrong with our early availability is the following. They saw this capability and they said, "This is great. It allows me to manage my bandwidth on demand." So early on we would follow up with customers and we would interview them and we would say, "OK, what's working, what's not?" They didn't have their own internal processes, and quite frankly the accountability for folks that had access to this capability assigned.

So the network engineers would have access to dial up and dial back down bandwidth, but they didn't have, or they weren't given, the authority to make those changes. They didn't have the authority to make billing decisions for their organizations. So they had to adapt. Their environment had to adapt. Their people, processes and policies had to adapt.

Going forward, that's even more important today because we are talking about organizational environments whereby decisions are being made that have consequences -- that have financial consequences, that have operating consequences -- and if the organization that is consuming SDN does not recognize that and apply it, there's a serious missed opportunity. You won't be able to realize the benefit that SDN provides.

TT: So it sounds like two of the keys here are; understanding your roadmap and goals and having sufficient cultural empowerment in your organization?

AS: Yes. Well stated. How you stated that second piece is spot on. That first piece is critical as well. If you're running your own business, your own enterprise, not only understanding what your own roadmap is, but what are your critical partners' roadmaps? How do those come together in the future? Because SDN is evolving from being a point solution to being a critical piece of the puzzle of this overall adaptive networking story and implementation. If that roadmap is inconsistent with your own roadmap, then you'll realize the benefits of neither.

TT: Beyond what we've already talked about, what other cultural, political, or organizational barriers are you seeing in enterprises moving to software-defined networking?

AS: Culturally, I would say there is a little bit of fear in that software-defined networking -- software-defined anything, really -- can have on the employees, and there's a fear that it's going to replace the employees. But I see it really as a shift in the employee base to become more consultative not only with our customers' customers, but in our customers' business models.

It's getting folks to understand what that means, what the introduction of software into their operating environment means for their business. So think about your business and how software and really our lives have changed with technology. It used to be that we were bound to our office -- both from a do-our-job perspective because that's where the paperwork stood and that's where our phones rang -- to being in a highly mobile operating environment. Translate that into the business of today when our data is really anywhere. Our networks need to be anywhere, those computing resources can be anywhere. It changes how we do business and it changes the overall governance of and opportunities to grow the marketplace.

And honestly, that's probably one of the biggest things that I hear is that this pursuit of automation that SDX {software-defined everything] will bring is going to completely wipe out the employee base, and I just don't see that true at all. I see it making it more -- much more -- efficient in the jobs that we do. And yeah it's going to require a shift in what we do and how we do it. Honestly, those that can't make that shift, yeah, they're going to be pushed out. But those that do -- and when I say "those," I mean the employee, the organization and customers alike -- are going to thrive.

All too often, we as an industry talk about the technology and I don't get enough opportunity to talk about the people impact and the impact of our customers. I mean, that's what truly motivates me. These questions and digging into those impacts are exciting because that tells me that there are others that are just as energized about those same influencers in the industry.

— Joe Stanganelli, Contributing Writer, Telco Transformation