If You Thought 2011 Was Exciting for Networks, Wait Until You Get a Load of 2012

M. Spanbauer

Summary Bullets:

• Mobility will continue to drive enterprise network spend aggressively in the campus.
• Data center fabrics will further coalesce, and interoperability between carrier and private networks will improve (performance and simplicity).

Last year saw a number of new initiatives and exciting developments drive the network industry forward.  WLAN growth was enormous, due to both the proliferation of wireless-enabled devices being brought into the enterprise and the sheer economics of not having to re-cable a plant or campus for increased productivity.  This year will only see this investment increase, and the WLAN sector will benefit for it.  Look for Aruba, Cisco, HP, Motorola, and more to articulate and differentiate based on their existing market share and technology breadth.  As device proliferation accelerates and more enterprise applications become tablet-friendly, enterprises will begin to establish processes and some will even go so far as to provide company-sponsored tablets which they can control and administer directly.  Whoever purchases the tablet is secondary to the additional increase in WLAN traffic that will come with these devices.  If your architecture is more than two or three years old, it is time to evaluate and plan for traffic contingencies to ensure that productivity applications will have sufficient bandwidth to perform well.  Those applications will include VDI, mobile video conferencing, and new and creative use cases for bi-directional multimedia (multi-site classrooms, multi-site faculty participation, etc.).