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June - 2013 - issue > In Conversation
Automation, Connectivity and Interoperability The Need Of The Hour
Sohail Parekh
Executive Vice President-Engineering -Infoblox
Sunday, June 2, 2013
Infoblox (NYSE:BLOX) delivers essential technology to help customers control their networks through enterprise network infrastructure automation software and hardware. Headquartered in Santa Clara, the company has a current market capital of $1.01 billion.

The rigorous change in technology has initiated a parallel need of updated infrastructure. Several trends are evolving within the industry making it a need to keep oneself rationalized. This has not only inclined me to spend considerable amount of time investigating new technologies, trends and adjacent markets but also work closely with the VP of Strategy to help define the product strategy.

Trends Bringing Shift

Technology is trying to address a new need each day. There are several trends shaping the industry, but the major three are Next Generation Datacenters, Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Real-time Analytics.
New advancements such as virtualization, cloud and BYOD are putting enormous strain on today's brittle network infrastructure. To keep up with computing needs, next-generation data centers must become highly virtualized and require a high degree of application, server and network virtualization. Today, many IT departments are plagued with time-intensive, manual and costly processes, which simply cannot scale to meet increasing demand. To solve this problem, a very high degree of automation, connectivity and interoperability is needed, and there lies the big opportunity.

SDN is a new technology trend that provides for high-degree of networking connectivity and automation, all under software-control. Although server-side virtualization has been with us for over 10 years and offers significant opportunity for automation, network-side management and control is proprietary, manual and segregated. SDN transforms management and control of networking elements and enables significant automation.
Historically, the focus has been on financial-data, its significance and importance. However, one may argue that networking-data that governs network and data center security, reliability and connectivity is just as important, if not more. The ability to model networking data in real-time, perform the necessary machine learning and make the necessary adjustments in the network at wire-speed will transform network security and capacity-management going forward.

IPv4 to IPv6: The Transition and the Concerns

Some parts of the U.S. Federal government are deploying IPv6 aggressively, primarily because they are under a mandate to do so. Outside of the U.S., carriers in Asia and Europe are beginning to deploy, too, because IPv4 address space is both scarce and costly, while IPv6 address space is virtually unlimited and nearly free.

The biggest concern we see with organizations looking to implement IPv6 is fear of the unknown. Once they understand that IPv6 is not that much more complicated than IPv4, and that the steps involved in deploying IPv6 to the Internet edge are straightforward, they are usually much more willing to move forward.

Incorporating New Networking Paradigm

We intend to expand and redefine the DDI space by incorporating automation. Over the last couple of years, we have been expanding our product portfolio and focus in the area of network automation and control. We intend to expand our offerings by incorporating new networking paradigms, like SDN.

Modern malware and highly targeted advance persistent threats (APT) are quickly changing the security landscape where one-box solutions (e.g. firewall, IPS/IDS) and yesterday's pack-inspection based pattern-matching for threat detection is not good enough. Large networking datasets with application-level visibility must be analyzed continuously by incorporating appropriate use of machine learning and real-time analytics to detect subtle and inappropriate behavior changes at wire-speed.

Over the next couple of years, these initiatives will expand our product offerings, IP portfolio and overall business opportunities. These initiatives will also require new technologies to be incorporated in our products and hence significant expansion of engineering team’s technical skills.

Learning more from Failures than Successes

It was a phenomenal experience building programmable switches at Junction, Inc (acquired by Cisco) and later building telephony soft-switches for the VoIP industry at Syndeo, Inc. The focus of a startup is always the customer and offering a differentiated value proposition with a significant impact (i.e., enable new paradigms, new business models and/or result in significant cost savings and others). Market timing and luck (yes, you heard me correctly) are equally as significant factors. We clearly had most of the elements right at Junction and succeeded. However, we missed the market-timing at Syndeo (and with tech-bubble burst, perhaps luck). Having said that, you learn more from your failures than successes. Being a founder in two startups has tremendously impacted and shaped my career, as well as overall outlook. I am a risktaker and not afraid to dabble with new technologies. I have remained fairly technical throughout my career and firmly believe you can't manage what you don't understand. (As told to Anamika Sahu)
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