Interview: Douglas Loewe on Network Management

Ahead of the Network Management Show 2014, we've been interviewing our speakers to get their views on the hot topics.

 

This week we spoke to Douglas Loewe, Managing Director, Interxion, who will be speaking on Day 1 of the conference on the topic of 'Connectivity and Managing Data Centres: Making Smart Cities a Reality'. Read his thoughts below.  

Why is network management important in the telecom industry today? 

As a carrier neutral data centre, we don’t operate our own network, but we do work with over 500 carriers, so we have a pretty good understanding of what works for them and their customers.

 
One of things our customers say they look for when picking a carrier is the ability to ensure their high value applications have excellent response times for their end users. To deliver good response times you need to have good network management, so in my view good network management is absolutely crucial for the telecom industry.    

 

Where do you see most innovation happening in the network today? 

I think the key innovation has to be around flexibility through things like better speed of provisioning and dynamic bandwidth. Also I think application aware networking is really interesting and something that is changing the networking landscape.    

 

Is how you manage your network an opportunity for differentiation for telecom operators? 

Definitely.  When enterprises come to our data centre they tend to already know which carriers they want to use and the carriers that we hear the most are usually the ones that are well managed, offer flexibility and most importantly can deliver good response times.

 

How do you guarantee the customer experience? 

From what I see when working with carriers, is those that offer extra layers of resilience with good capacity to handle rapid traffic growth are usually the ones that continuously deliver on customer experience.  

 

Can operators look at trends such as SDN, Big Data, and network sharing in isolation or must they consider the wider Network Management perspective?

 

I don’t think any of these can be looked at in isolation. What we are seeing is that carrier-neutral data centres are the place where operators are introducing their SDN and Big Data products first and enterprises are selecting the carriers that can support all of these services and have a integrated approach on them.   

 

If you are interested in attending The Network Management Show you can find out more here.