Avaya General Manager Marc Randall has been in the networking business a long time. In that time he’s learned key lessons, one of which he shared from the keynote stage at the Interop 2012 conference in Las Vegas.
“You evolve your network or you get beaten up,” Randall said. “It’s easy to say ‘evolve’ but it’s really hard to do as there is a lot to consider.”
Modern network evolution includes dealing with cloud, BYOD, virtualization, and mobility among other concerns. For Randall though, he stressed that, fundamentally, it all comes down to just two things.
“It’s about applications and devices,” Randall said. “Why? Because that’s all your users really care about. That’s what people want and besides that they want it to be cloud easy.”
The idea of “cloud-easy” is something that is easy to implement. For example, even a less-than-tech-savvy user can be up and running with Dropbox or even Amazon Web services very quickly.
“Like it or not, your users are going to measure you by the quality that you deliver services to them and they will use cloud computing as a benchmark,” Randall said. “Most network evolutions are incremental, but today’s user expectations are almost unrealistic.”
Read the full story at EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet:
Avaya: Evolve or Get Beat Up
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.