Tony Kourlas
Director, Service Provider Strategy
Solace Systems

Service provider network infrastructure is going through major transformations to address critical scale and cost issues, a step necessary to cope with global IP proliferation and commoditization. From a services perspective, however, most of these next-generation networks will be the same as ever and continue to carry traffic and secure connections on behalf of enterprise and consumer applications. Companies such as Google, Yahoo, and eBay have become giants as demand shifted from basic IP connectivity to networked applications and services.

At the same time, enterprise chief information officers are struggling with the custom code development, expensive middleware, and directories required to manage the flow of information. They are looking to outsource this complexity. Leading software vendors such as Microsoft and IBM have responded to the challenge by retooling their entire companies to align with SOA and Web services — two sweeping global trends aimed at streamlining and interconnecting companies while simplifying application complexity into smaller, more discrete services.

With a low-cost, highly scalable IP/multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) infrastructure in place, service providers are well positioned to capitalize from these sweeping changes by reaching up the value chain toward applications and content and adding value to the real-time flow of information. The key ingredient missing thus far has been content-aware networking, the underlying technology required by service providers to understand and forward content based on predefined rules. Content-aware networks allow service providers to filter, transform, and route critical business data to enterprise customers and their partners based on their unique interests and data formats.

For carriers, content-aware networks allow them to bring to market new high-margin value-added services that tighten bonds with their key enterprise customers and provide differentiation in a crowded, commoditized bandwidth marketplace. The availability of application layer network services such as database synchronization, real-time alerting, or an ESB/middleware backbone service allows enterprises to refocus CAPEX on what is core to their business and outsource IT complexity as part of their OPEX.

Consumer services present a similar challenge with complex centralized configuration and tracking systems that do little to leverage the network and thus are as easily provided by third parties as the service provider. Content-aware networks understand what users are interested in and can filter, route, transform, and deliver that content directly to them, all from within the service provider's network.

OBuilt as an overlay on existing IP/MPLS infrastructure, a content-aware network escalates the service provider from a commodity provider of bandwidth to a strategic supplier of lifestyle-relevant services that become the basis of a strong direct relationship with consumers.