‘Open Innovation to spur growth of ICT business in Nigeria’

  Akin Banuso, Enterprise Business Manager of Dell, has said that the rise of open standards, frameworks and architectures, and a shift from proprietary models will give way to new solutions with regards to networking in the Nigerian business landscape.

He made this known as he highlighted three networking paradigms that are shaping the business landscape across the world today.

“Broadly speaking there are three major trends within the networking space that are currently shaping the industry; convergence, distributed networking and software defined networks,” he said.These topics are not new to the table and haven been discussed for some time, they are now beginning to hit the mainstream in terms of the maturity of the technology and where they are on the corporate agenda, Banuso said.

The first of these ‘Networking Big3’ shapers of the industry is Convergence.

Banuso explains that, “it’s not wholly a networking issue” but its impact on the way networks are managed and – just as importantly – who manages them, should not be underestimated.

According to him previously IT functioned in silos, with server, storage and network administrators going about their business relatively independently.

“When someone within the organisation wanted a new resource provisioned, working across these silos to make that happen could be a painful and unnecessarily cumbersome experience,’’ he said.

Software defined networking, is the next of the ‘Networking Big3’.

Although the technology is still in its infancy, software defined networking (SDN) is widely touted to revolutionise network infrastructures on the same scale as virtualization in the server market.

This is because traditional networking has been unable to offer the flexibility that networking managers require today.

Distributed networking is another Big3 networking shaper of industry.

According to Banuso, ‘’firstly, the workforce has become extremely disperse and mobile. Secondly, virtualization and cloud computing have resulted in much higher server-to-server traffic flow than before. Finally, enterprises now have vastly larger volumes of data to process, store, and analyse than was previously the case’’. 

BEN UZOR JR