Resolving Operator Challenges – Finally

Network Transformation starts with people

DriveNets sales team has grown significantly in the recent weeks, as you would expect from a company that just completed a $208M round B. This newly created sales dream-team consists of highly experienced professionals, coming from all the major routing and networking vendors in the market and bringing centuries(J) of accumulated knowledge of the challenges faced by operators who are building high-scale  networks.

After an intensive week with these masters, I am very happy to say that their overall reaction to the technology, architecture and solutions provided by DriveNets was – WOW! For us at DriveNets, this was the expected reaction to the network cloud concept by people who live and breathe operator challenges like these salesmen.  These guys see service providers struggle with declining profitability due to the enormous cost of their networks and the complex architectures they need to maintain. And they also know very well the limitations of the current high-scale routers that they have been selling to these operators for years.  These salespeople have long term relationship with their customers.  Many times, they may have developed friendships. So, when they see a solution that address their customers’ pain points, they are thrilled to be part of the team that will deliver it to them.

Resolving Operators’ Challenges

For years, operators were looking for a solution that will allow lower costs (CAPEX and OPEX), simplified operations, optimized scaling of infrastructure and faster innovation paths, leading to prompt introduction of new services and faster time to revenues. And now, the solution is here. DriveNets Network Cloud is a new concept, where network functions are implemented as cloud instances, over a shared infrastructure based on networking-optimized, cloud-native hardware. This practically means that the network is built like cloud, and as such, brings the real benefits of cloud infrastructure to the networking realm, including the ability to implement multiple network functions over the same infrastructure and to dynamically and elastically optimize the network, according to varying traffic patterns and services evolution. This is exactly what made our enhanced sales dream-team embrace the solution, stand up, and even applaud.

The Under-utilized Incumbent Solutions

Most of the sales team comes from a world of monolithic solutions where every network function was implemented on a dedicated network element. An architecture where not only operators have a huge number of network elements in their network, but they also see most of these network elements partially populated, partially utilized and loaded with problems in software functions that in many cases, are not relevant to them. Those monolithic systems are as frustrating to a vendors’ salesperson, as they are to their customers – the communications service providers (CSPs). The unique chance to move away from those systems, into a network cloud solution – a shared network infrastructure that can support multiple software-based networks, is as exciting to the salespeople as they are to the CSPs. And this is just the beginning. Other benefits, such as simplified scaling, leaner infrastructure with fewer number of ports, open ecosystem, and more, make it even more appealing and better fitting to today’s cloud world. So, when thinking of it, after seeing the excited reaction of many tier-1 communications service providers to the network cloud concept, it is not that surprising to see the same reaction from the salespersons that used to work with those CSPs and share, on a daily basis, their challenges and frustrations.

Just Getting Started

And that was just our kickoff for 2021. This year is expected to be the year in which the network-cloud architecture will serve as the blueprint architecture for building core, edge and aggregation networks. If you are a network designer in a CSP – you should probably take a deeper look into the network-cloud architecture. If you are an experienced networking salesperson – you should really look for an open position in DriveNets.