If there’s any indication that ITEXPO (News - Alert) East 2012 is off to a strong start, one should have had to look no further than today’s keynote luncheon in which tw telecom’s Mike Rouleau took the stage to spread a pretty substantial message, that “Ethernet is the new T1.”
To an enthusiastic and packed lunch crowd, Rouleau – senior vice president of Business Development & Strategies for tw telecom (News - Alert), a top-tier business Ethernet provider – expounded upon how “big dumb pipes” are out, and how exactly Ethernet is enabling a new IT infrastructure.
Rouleau told the audience how he has seen a significant change in the way IT administrators utilize Ethernet within their environment. It all comes down to convergence, or the way in which IT consolidates and collapses their infrastructure onto a common backbone to give customers the scalability and flexibility they need to connect and communicate.
Not only has Ethernet burst onto the technology scene, but Rouleau says Ethernet has “eclipsed TDM infrastructure.” Even more, whereas Ethernet used to be a strategy for capabilities like accessing the Internet and the plug-and-play approach. “We’ve now evolved to focus more on Ethernet as enabling technologies for the connected enterprise.”
According to Rouleau, CIO’s “top-of-mind” right now is on how to take advantage of these new technologies, particularly around the cloud, and leverage this new infrastructure to deliver solutions in a faster, on-demand and more scalable manner. Based on CIOs’ basic needs – flexibility, reliability, availability and expense control – it’s clear they are looking to do it “faster, better and easier,” noted Rouleau.
Moving on, Rouleau said he has observed a “fundamental shift in the way customers buy and consume their bandwidth.” Accordingly, he said the network will be forced to change how capabilities and functionalities are delivered to the customer mostly due to an obvious change in the apps being supported.
Displaying statistics from Cisco’s (News 
- Alert) Global Cloud Index, Rouleau shared with the audience that cloud computing is projected to grow 12-fold by 2015, and at least half of all workloads will be processed in the cloud within two years. Today’s adoption of the cloud is giving way to new and different roles, which Rouleau listed as infrastructure providers, platform providers, applications providers, business process service providers, brokers for the enterprise, and advisors to the enterprise.
In addressing the cloud, customers are trying to find their place in what’s been a significant gap in the enterprise. Whereas today is known as the “hardwired enterprise,” promising security, visibility, boundaries and performance, tomorrow’s enterprise is bound to be the “technology revolution,” a world full of on-demand, device-agnostic technologies, and lack of boundaries.
tw telecom is bracing for this shift to virtualization and the cloud and in the manner in which customers consume and buy bandwidth with its Intelligent Network, the company’s latest project designed to give customers more control of their networks and IT expenditures by more cost-effectively and efficiently delivering new applications at a more rapid pace. This initiative will be completed in three stages: offering greater visibility into what’s occurring in a network to optimally manage the applications environment; granting on-demand, dynamic capacity to support changes in the IT environment so customers can scale up their availability in real-time; and lastly, controlling and prioritizing applications.
TW TELECOM is a GOLD sponsor of ITEXPO East 2012. Happening NOW at the Miami Beach Convention Center in Miami, Fla. ITEXPO is the world’s premier IP communications event. Visit TW TELECOM in booth #322. For more information on ITEXPO registration click here.Stay in touch with everything happening at ITEXPO… Follow us on Twitter.
Tammy Wolf is a TMCnet web editor. She covers a wide range of topics, including IP communications and information technology. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.
Edited by Rich Steeves
