Managed Service Providers who have been challenged with trying to provide IT services to budget-constrained small-to-medium businesses (SMBs), while maintaining profitability, now have the opportunity to achieve a win-win for themselves and their SMB customers with virtualized networking. With the enhanced, virtualized ability to provide services at the network edge, MSPs can now offer distributed SMB and enterprise remote office customers a fully-managed enterprise-class of services that require no local expertise or onsite resources, and deliver enterprise-class routing functions without the associated labor and transport costs of conventional network deployments. By being able to extend their reach to a broader range of customers, MSPs would have a new managed networking service to offer that would materially boost revenue and increase profitability.
If you are a Service Provider looking to offer the full benefits of virtualized networking at the edge for your distributed SMB and enterprise remote office customers, then you want to find a vendor offering a solution based on the concepts of software-defined networking (SDN) or network functions virtualization (NFV). To be thorough in your research and make sure you find the vendor that will meet your needs as well as those of your customers, you should ask the following questions of any virtualized networking solution vendor you are considering:
1. How does this product improve my service profitability?
A virtualized network vendor’s level of automation should demonstrate to you that design and deployment of services would be relatively easy and require no special expertise. The vendor should be able to reduce your operational expenses dramatically — by as much as 10:1 — allowing you to deploy services and grow your customer base quickly. If the vendor supports an open ecosystem of virtual applications, you can feel confident that you would be on your way to increasing the average revenue per user (ARPU) over time, because new requirements won’t obsolete your general-purpose hardware.
2. What’s the compelling value of your product to my end customers? What will make them want to buy services from me?
SMBs want enterprise-class products for their networking service, but the SMB just doesn’t have the required capital to buy, maintain or support them. SMBs typically find themselves buying networking devices that are underpowered and dedicated to specific functions. They need to put a great deal of thought into what they’re going to buy because they’ll need to keep it for a long time, and that’s not what they want to be doing. They want to be flexible, to turn services up or down, to move and change, and to make a future-proof decision, however, you can’t offer this agility to them with traditional, purpose-built networking equipment.
