The newest member of the TeleGeography Explains the Internet club is telecom industry veteran Mark Daley, Epsilon Telecommunications Director of Digital Strategy and Business Development.
After spending nearly a decade directly involved with SDN and NaaS at Epsilon Telecommunications, Mark is the perfect guest to help me talk through how NaaS is unfolding in the market.
The pod starts with Mark’s definition of NaaS and where he sees its availability in the current telecom services landscape. He also shares six important NaaS characteristics: visible, configurable, priceable, orderable, deployable, and manageable. (Be sure to write that down.)
Later, we talk about the history of Epsilon Telecommunications and how its mission became integrated into an incumbent provider.
Hit the play button below to gain insights into how NaaS has evolved over time, and clarity on what to expect in the future.
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Key Takeaways
Understanding Network as a Service
A central theme of the conversation is defining and understanding NaaS. Mark Daly, drawing on his experience at Epsilon, offers a comprehensive definition. He views it as presenting network elements, individually or combined, as components that users can orchestrate. This includes presenting network connections, cloud access, internet access, and merging physical and functional concepts end-to-end or piecemeal.
NaaS also involves the "verticalization" of services, adding layers like network overlay with insight or security.
A core part of his explanation is six characteristics that a NaaS offering should possess:
- Visible: Inventory and network functions must be visible to the user.
- Configurable: The user must be able to configure the desired service.
- Priceable: A price must be presented based on the configuration.
- Orderable: The service must be easily orderable after the price is presented.
- Deployable: The configuration can be pushed down into the network or up into the cloud.
- Manageable: Once the service is live, the user has visibility into its status, health, and performance (like jitter or latency).
The Evolution from SDN to NaaS and the Influence of Cloud Services
The conversation traces the historical evolution of programmable networking from early software defined networking (SDN) concepts, initially focused on carrier or data center logistics.
SDN aimed to simplify internal network management and deployment but initially lacked strong enterprise interest. A key turning point and driver for broader adoption was when cloud providers started offering APIs. This attracted enterprise interest because they needed programmable ways to connect to hyperscalers, creating "light bulb moments" where companies saw they could interact with the network similarly to how they interacted with cloud services.
While early SDN implementations focused on point-to-point connections programmable within a single network, the influence of the cloud helped evolve the concept toward consuming the network like other cloud services, requiring greater control, policy setting, and visibility.
Application-Oriented Networking, Interoperability, and Alliances
Looking ahead, the discussion highlights the potential for NaaS to enable agile solution deployment.
Mark envisions a future where setting up a new office could involve simply clicking options on a portal to deploy internet access, unified communications, and phone numbers rapidly.
A critical element of future NaaS is the concept of application-oriented networking, where network design starts from the application layer, considering which applications need to interact and their mission criticality.
Applications, especially those with performance visibility like SD-WAN overlays, can act as a form of "AI" by signaling network needs to the underlying transport layer. This leads to the idea of multi-layer NaaS, where higher-layer services can tell the network what it needs.
Greg Bryan
Greg is Senior Manager, Enterprise Research at TeleGeography. He's spent the last decade and a half at TeleGeography developing many of our pricing products and reports about enterprise networks. He is a frequent speaker at conferences about corporate wide area networks and enterprise telecom services. He also hosts our podcast, TeleGeography Explains the Internet.
