10.05.05
Posted in Technology Ventures, Globalization at 5:13 am by Ray Wu
Even though globalization presents significant saving for an enterprise, there are hurdles that need to be overcome. One of the top issues is performance and optimization for timely remote access. This issue is not new. In order to save cost and create a consistent data warehouse, an enterprise tends to centralize data operation and consolidate web infrastructure. This is great from a management perspective, but the assumption is that the network is fast enough to deliver the performance. This kind of design works well if majority of access comes in from well-connected US and Canada, but as an enterprise becomes global, the central server is not that ideal and performance degrades quickly, especially from remote locations such as Asia and Middle-East. Keep on buying more bandwidth in developing countries could be costly. Companies tend to address it by several kinds of techniques:
- delta bandwidth optimization (ie. fineground) which was acquired by Cisco recently
- local dynamic edge data caching ( ie commendo)
- deploy WAN optimization technology from Peribit Networks, acquired by Juniper.
All of these solutions work, depends on how much control an enterprise has end-to-end and whether the data is dynamic or static.
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10.03.05
Posted in Technology Ventures at 5:15 am by Ray Wu
Recently, several people approached me and asked how much VCs invested in a particular space. The issue here is less about the investment amount, more on the space definition. As technology evolves, traditional technology boundary is blurring and vendor coverages are overlapping. Customers no longer want to tolerate multiple single point technology, they want a single solution. A good example is management. Traditionally, in the network management, each of the FCAPS (fault, configuration, accounting, performance, security) domain is segmented out and tends to have vendors concentrate on a sigle domain. But today, a customer would not want to purchase from separate vendors, they want one vendor to provide all and integrate them together. Maybe it is just 80% of the solution, but 80% solution is good enough and would cut OPEX cost down dramatically. So the vendors tend shift focus over time and provide more coverage in order to maintain that customer. Now the interesting question is about how to define a vendor, especially a startup correctly: for example, is it a security vendor providing management solution or a management vendor providing security solution? Should the vendor be classified under security or under management? Now bring it up one more level and compound the network management with other layers: OS, server, storage, application, users etc, the classification becomes a major endeavor. My suggestion to that rather than define a generic space, let’s start with a customer problem. Using that to drive is much clearer than using a category defined by an analyst…
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