More and more, the Internet is becoming an integral part of all businesses' communications strategies. But moving from legacy networks, such as frame relay or leased lines, to an IP-based intranet or extranet can be complicated and expensive for large businesses, and downright cost-prohibitive for smaller companies. But one new company hopes to make it a lot easier for businesses of all sizes to migrate to IP and manage those services via the web.
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| Ray Bell, chairman and CEO, SmartPipes Inc. |
SmartPipes Inc. (www.smartpipes.com) launched the beta version of its Global IP Services in early October with carriers such as XO Communications (www.xo.com, formerly NEXTLINK Communications) and UUNET Technologies Inc. (www.uu.net), and plans to hit the ground running with widespread availability at the beginning of 2001.
SmartPipes' mix of integrated web servers, relational databases, directories and its own advanced policy networking software applications allow service providers to help their customers easily define and deploy their own secure corporate intranets, add extranets with trading partners, and eventually support interactive communications with end-to-end SLAs. All services are ordered and managed via a web interface that is operated and supported in SmartPipes' carrier-class Network Intelligence Centers.
SmartPipes is the conception of former executives of Cisco Systems Inc. (www.cisco.com), FORE Systems, Oracle Corp. (www.oracle.com) and UUNET, who have had experience with distributed networking and working on the Directory Enabled Network initiative.
"We said, 'Here's a great opportunity for a company who understands [how to meld heterogeneous networks] to go out and build that type of policy service infrastructure. Here's a particular market that is waiting to go, but is missing that underlying piece of technology to let it go.' In other words, all the hardware and protocols were there, but the service infrastructure was missing," says Ray Bell, SmartPipes' chairman and CEO, himself a veteran of Cisco, Oracle and CP Software Group (www.cpsg.com).
xchange's executive editor Gail Lawyer recently spoke with Bell about SmartPipes' genesis, its commercial launch and the benefits that it hopes to bring service providers and their business customers.
X: How did your and your co-founders' past experiences help formulate the plan for SmartPipes?
Ray Bell: The idea started germinating quite a few years ago when I was at Oracle. The idea was that devices needed to be a little bit more intelligent to plug into the network and get some intelligence from it. I got recruited into Cisco to look at how to integrate the desktop into the network. What we were trying to do was figure out how to model network devices--the physical and logical aspects, the protocols and the services that ran on them--in a database type of structure. That turned out to be the Directory Enabled Network Initiative, an industry standard. It gives you a nice architecture so you can go out and build products.
The problem we were trying to solve for the customer was as we built more advanced functionality into the network itself, such as the ability to have security in the network--and the ability to have differentiated types of service for different types of traffic on the network--how does the end user use and manage this functionality? That was the business problem.
Along the way I hooked up with my three other founders.
X: And those experiences morphed into the SmartPipes business plan?
Bell: We realized that a lot of [the service providers'] efforts were focused on building out the network and improving infrastructure as new technology, such as optics, came out. They have a demand for IP, with backlogs every month in actually servicing the orders for DSL connectivity, for T1s and T3s. Their IT organizations are just focused on those problems, the day-to-day running of the business.
To actually build a distributed system to provision and monitor services above the physical network, service providers needed to get a different kind of engineering talent into the organization.
We thought the time was ripe to create a company that focused just on this problem.
X: Explain the problem.
Bell: Many people think that the Internet is ubiquitous. But as a networking technology, it only represents about 20 percent of the data networking that corporations do today. Most of the remaining 80 percent is integrating of branch offices, so they can run their applications between their various offices. This has traditionally been done with frame relay, which in the early 1990s was a new disruptive technology for replacing private, leased lines.
While frame is massively deployed, it's generally at the large corporate level. It's hard for small and medium-sized businesses to get frame relay networks.
So you have two interesting issues going on. You have the industry looking to embrace Internet technology, with small companies looking to improve their data connectivity. And you have big companies saying they want to embrace Internet technology, and if they could actually use that as their distributed network foundation as well, it would improve their business.
The industry responded two years ago by creating VPNs. A lot of device manufacturers had acquired products and had new products built specifically to look at how to set up a virtual connection, and secure and encrypt it over IP.
We're looking at that as an opportunity because those current solutions are high touch, but low volume. While the routers and switches themselves are very useful, the management consoles are generally built by the companies who make the hardware. The console works specifically for that device, not for any other devices that it needs to interact with.
Before we left Cisco, we created a whole concept of DENs [directory enabled networks] that was rolled into policy-based networking. Policy-based networking looks at using the network in a nondevice-specific way. So if I have a set of devices at my branch offices that are going to form my intranet, I can actually model that as physical topology. Over that I have a logical set of services that I want to run. If I want to run an application in several offices and have various departments that need secure access to that, or have audio-video conferencing between two meeting rooms, these are logical things that a business can describe. You want to overlay these over the physical topology. And on top of that, there's another aspect, the overall business policies themselves that might say these applications should only take priority over other applications on a congested network. The policy system lets the customer describe the data in that way, analyze it and generate out the device-specific configurations that are necessary to implement that.
There's a big paradigm shift here, as you let people view the network and put their business policies and rules on the network, rather than looking at it from the network. Instead of a bottom up view, it's a top down view.
X: Who are you offering this to--service providers or end users?
Bell: This isn't a shrink-wrapped product. The system itself runs on about 70 integrated high-end servers. There is database, web and directory technology, so we couldn't package it up. We made the decision to sell it indirect, to go out and cobrand it under partners' names, such as through XO and UUNET.
X: Why are providers such as XO and UUNET interested?
Bell: What really drove the XO deal was that Concentric [Network, which XO acquired] had built a business to drive DSL VPN to small and medium-sized business. They found that using existing products and technologies was a very high-touch, low-volume market. They were leaders in that, but they said [managing it] was like crawling over broken glass.
X: What does SmartPipes bring to its service provider partners?
Bell: Web-based services entirely run through web browsers. We have integration points with our partners. We've looked at the entire problem from cradle to grave and customers come in, in a scenario where they have no network, they want to order DSL, T1s to connect their various offices, cities and telecommuters. It's a wholesale quoting system that is integrated with our hardware suppliers, Cisco and Dell [Computer Corp., www.dell.com], and will automate the order entry of the data connectivity and devices that run with the type of data connectivity they want.
From that point the customer's order gets processed and the equipment starts showing up. They then go into our service administration interface, where they can describe their business requirements on top of the physical network.
We run the service, manage it and support it. When our partners' customers log on, they'll see the partner's logo on the screen, but that it is powered by SmartPipes. Once they log into the system, the customer experience is that they're in the UUNET or XO system. When they actually call the 800 number, it rings into our partners' help desk for level 0 and 1 support, then it escalates up to our support desk and we answer on behalf of our customer, including even rolling a truck if we need to do field replacement of hardware.
X: Is your offering something that service providers don't have the resources to do themselves?
Bell: There's specialization going on. XO is specialized at creating a network for telephony and data, and running those backbones. But they're not specialized at building a service control infrastructure on top of it.
We built this totally on a Windows 2000 operating system on a Dell platform. We took the database, directory and web server product as building blocks and built the service around them. We have patents pending on the architecture.
There's a barrier of entry for a lot of our partners. They'd have to create business units with a couple of hundred people with that expertise, design the system from the ground up and build it. There's clearly a market for it.
X: Will this be available nationwide, or restricted to certain geographic areas?
Bell: It goes into mass availability in January. We're focused in the United States, but we're building out centers during the first quarter 2001 in Europe, second quarter in Australia, and third quarter in Asia, so it's really a global service.
