It’s said that every company is now a digital business. But what should organizations do to ensure a successful digital transformation?

That includes a rethink of network architecture. And it should include the move to more agile, application-aware, and software-based networks. That’s the word from InfoVista (News - Alert) and ZK Research.

To help businesses learn more about best practices on this front and solutions to help enable them, InfoVista and ZK Research are staging an online event called Discover Application Aware Networking for the Application Era. This Jan. 18 webinar will feature speakers Ricardo Belmar (News - Alert), senior director of enterprise product marketing at InfoVista, and Zeus Kerravala, founder and principal of ZK Research and a long-time industry analyst in the telecommunications arena.

They will discuss digital transformation in the enterprise; what you need to move to an application-centric network; and the role SDN and SD-WAN can and should play in all of this.

InfoVista bought Ipanema, which Gartner (News - Alert) categorized as a WAN optimization company visionary, about a year and a half ago. Since then InfoVista has emphasized the ability of that solution to bring control and visibility to enterprise networks, with a strong emphasis on operational performance in wide area networks, Belmar told me in a November interview. The end goal, he added, is to enable end users to have good experiences with their apps. He added that applying logic and providing more granular information about WAN conditions is a differentiator for InfoVista.

For example, say a business running Skype (News - Alert) for Business has branch locations and a couple different networks – an MPLS network and also some direct interconnection links, and that it wants to use all those connections, he said. The InfoVista solution can enable IT staff to specify what performance levels they want to achieve for Skype for Business and their other applications. Those rules are then put into the InfoVista system. That way, the network knows what to do when it sees Skype for Business traffic.