Last week I caught up with Michael Szabados, SVP of product operations at NetScout, who had returned from speaking at the UTC Telecom Conference in Tampa. UTC is an organization of utility and energy companies or, as they like to call themselves, "CI" - Critical Infrastructure. Like so many of NetScout's customers, these companies rely heavily on their corporate networks to run their businesses and those IP networks are only becoming more important.
At the show, Michael spoke to a number of IT folks from companies ranging from mid-tier municipal power companies to very large energy enterprises (with 20,000+ employees), and the most-discussed topic was convergence to IP.
Not only did these companies say that they are starting to take business VoIP deployments seriously, but they are also moving a lot of market-specific applications to their IP networks. They said this includes everything from streaming video surveillance systems for their remote (possibly un-manned) sites, video for employee training, traditional security monitoring systems, telemetry, specialized SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition} applications and especially power or energy flow management applications. Imagine prioritizing all of that key application traffic into QoS classes, and making sure they are running well.
This convergence of many previously out-of-band or non-IP mission critical applications mandates the need for these companies to monitor and manage the performance of their IP network. Making sure e-mail and general office business applications run well across the network is one thing. When the network carries the control application used to route surplus energy to the right market during peak summer usage times when blackouts occur, its response time and performance could impact an entire region, not just the business.
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