The last decade has seen a revolution in enterprise networking with a major transformation of enterprise WANs from the legacy networking technologies of frame relay and ATM to IP VPN and wide area Ethernet technologies. But business and communications applications continue to grow both in terms of traffic and in the demands they place on enterprise network services. The next decade will see the full emergence of ‘applications-centric networking’ based, not on yet another generation of networking technologies, but on a greatly expanded range of capabilities for existing networking technologies such as MPLS-based IP VPNs and VPLS. These capabilities will include the ability to provide applications prioritisation from the cloud and dynamic bandwidth which responds in realtime to the needs of the business and communications applications supported by the network. In addition, the growth of cloud computing and software as a service (SaaS) will place greater demands on the role and capability of the public Internet for business users and will lead to the adoption of features and capabilities only seen on private IP networks today.
