Taking the driver’s seat in the App-centric journey

The app economy has taken hold of the world at lightning pace. It is as much social and cultural as it is economic. At its core is how it affects and engages the wider technology landscape. Connectivity is no longer a mere mechanism of interconnected ‘dumb pipes’. Thanks to the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT), connectivity is evolving into an ecosystem of increasingly intelligent, bi–directional streams of knowledge. This shift to sensor-driven, wireless connectivity for devices, appliances, inert objects from the high-end (e.g. tracking electricity flows for cities) to the mundane (e.g. replacing the milk in your fridge) has taken the ubiquity of the Internet to a new level and is compelling companies of all sizes to transform and adapt.

Gartner predicts that by 2020, Internet of Things will create $1.9 trillion of economic value add, globally. In 2009, there were 2.5 billion connected devices, globally; most of these were mobile phones, PCs and tablets. In 2020, Gartner predicts there will be over 30 billion devices connected, of far greater variety.

While the demand is pushing new boundaries in connectivity and its applications, the technology ecosystem for enabling the IoT is highly fragmented. In order to make this new layer of interconnectedness work, solutions must be curated from various providers of sensors and communications modules, network management and control systems, communications networks, enterprise applications and customer-facing applications.

The network borders as we knew them are collapsing and in their place are seemingly disparate clusters of cloud and mobility, and the ever present generation of new sources of data and higher stream of traffic. For companies navigating this new terrain, management and planning of infrastructure is essential and understanding how to get ‘social intelligence’ in the connectivity fabric is paramount.

Intelligent data centres are now in vogue, splitting the control plane with data plane so that data and services can be shared and moved within an expandable network fabric. In order for ‘social intelligence’ to work, data and services need to be orchestrated efficiently and simply from a single point of management. Out of this shift, Software Defined Application Services (SDAS), the next inevitable phase in the evolution of application delivery has emerged. SDAS is the result of delivering highly flexible and programmatic application services from a unified, high-performance application service fabric and serves to solve the significant challenges that the IoT is creating. SDAS relies on abstraction, the ability to take advantage of resources pooled from any combination of physical, virtual and cloud-deployed platforms.

SDAS provides answers to new questions enterprises are facing from controlling application delivery via traffic management over broadening applications services to include web application security, mobility, LTE, domain name services in addition to facilitating cloud-ready services.

The Synthesis solution is already changing the way we interact with our customers and partners by giving them flexibility and the ability to be as inclusive as they like across their application choices.

The elastic, multi-tenant service fabric that delivers SDAS can cluster up to 32 F5 devices deployed across any combination of hardware, software or cloud and supports up to 80 unique instances per device. That translates to a combined throughput of 20 TB and connection capacity of 9.2 billion, more than three times the capacity needed to connect every Internet user in the world.

The changing application and network architecture landscape requires such an evolution in software defined app services. The new application centred world needs solutions that empower IT and business stakeholders to align technology with their biggest challenges. The application services that have become critical to ensuring the reliability, security and performance of the plethora of applications that enterprises engage with must be provisioned, managed and scaled in a way that aligns with an application-driven world.

As the industry collectively builds the faster, broader super connected, super highway for Software Defined Network players, we are ensuring that all cars get from point A to B smoothly, smartly and with tools to facilitate their their journey.