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VNOs arguably have a stronger a vested interest than the enterprise or the carrier in playing the role of the third party to manage the process.
Options Facing the Enterprise
Enterprises such as Siemens would have to take vital resources from their core business in order to manage a complex network solution in-house. On the plus side, the enterprise retains complete control, but many enterprises might decide as Siemens did that the prize is not be worth the price.
The enterprise would have to sign separate contracts with each supplier, negotiating SLAs and designing a solution to 'bolt-on' disparate parts of the network. . On MPLS-based infrastructure, it would have to identify a way to translate the different CoS marking schemes used by each supplier. The enterprise would also have to figure out how to perform the routing exchanges to allow traffic to flow from one segment of the network to the other. The end result might well be a network with no clear boundaries of
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Siemen's MPLS network infrastructure: "MPLS Matrix (the brand name of the VNO's MPLS service offering) enables multiple infrastructures to be integrated into a single, seamless solution."
Is MPLS the only solution?
As valuable as MPLS is, it may not always be the best solution. Other technologies might be even most cost-efficient in the right circumstances. Densely populated European areas have witnessed, during the past 18 months, an increased number of requests by enterprises to evolve their networks to post-MPLS technologies that offer even greater cost efficiency, and similar requests are growing in the United States.
Developed markets offer enterprises the opportunity to treat large sections of their networks like campus environments with LAN speeds between them. It's as efficient as MPLS while less costly. Making a change like this can allow businesses to work in a completely new way given the abundance of bandwidth offered. These post-MPLS
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responsibility, and the potential for performance issues to arise due to misconfiguration or the overall complexity of the design. Siemens turned to a VNO to design, implement and continuously manage a number of carriers. Any enterprise choosing this option must review the VNO in order to be certain it can trust it with a vital and mission-critical function. Siemens' Kuhn speaks of the confidence his company has in the VNO selected by Siemens -Vanco- to optimize
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technologies include Gigabit Ethernet and VPLS (which allows Layer 2 VPNs to be built between sites).
Again, it is the VNO that can play role of third party without a vested inerest in infrastructure to tell an enterprise when DSL might make more sense than MPLS and can integrate the best blend of technologies into a customized network that fits like a glove - or a pair of pants in the right size.
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