Thursday, 5 December 2013
Service Providers not adapting their organizations to embrace SDN won’t succeed
Brian Levy, EMEA SP Sector CTO, myself in SP Solutions Marketing and other colleagues at Juniper have been around, meeting with Service Providers around Europe Middle East and Africa, talking about SDN and NFV, both, very hot topics. I recently had a chance to sit with Brian to exchange our experiences that you can see in the video here.
First, what our customers really wanted to know about it, is what SDN and NFV really means… but beyond the hype of those new topics, Service Providers are really interested to know what’s in SDN and NFV for them. And as I wrote in my previous blog, this was the case as well at Broadband World Forum. The second question we usually get is around what Juniper brings to the SDN world and here we also have some exiting news around Contrail’s support in multiple hypervisors and the new Juniper Metafabric architecture.
The best way to understand the advantages that SDN and NFV brings, is to talk about different use-cases that help SPs to generate new revenue. The first one we discuss in the video is around providing more agile services on top of the traditional connectivity thanks to virtualizing certain network functions, starting from transforming the traditional enterprise CPE into a virtual CPE (or vCPE). The second use case for SDN is to help Service Providers to get inserted into the Cloud value chain, highlighting the value of the Network, the service wrap with single point of contact and finally the compliance to have the data in the right place. This last use-case is explained with details at this video-blog by Chloe Ma: Building Elastic, Adaptive and Secure Enterprise Private Cloud with Contrail
However, there is a big obstacle in adopting SDN and NFV by service providers, and it is not technical. Those disruptive technologies go across organizational boundaries, is it under CTO or CIO organizations? I remember writing about a similar cross-organizational boundary issue created by the introduction of MPLS directly over optical layers; that time, Kireeti Kompella named it The Purple Line, do you remember it? Most SPs went through an organizational transformation to be able to embrace it... a kind of Déjà vu?
Those Service providers that don’t react to the SDN technology and don’t create an organization that embraceit are really going to suffer in the next few years. SDN will be the platform that enables both: much greater network efficiency and much greater service capabilities, and Service providers really needs them.
Get your organizations ready and let’s embrace SDN!
Monday, 1 July 2013
Researchers Obtaining 3D Footprints of Animals to identify, track and monitor their health
Namita Lokare, Wes Snyder & Edgar Lobaton (L to R)
Edgar Lobaton, Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at NC State University and Wesley Snyder, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering are working with graduate student Namita Lokare to obtain three-dimensional footprints of large animals for computer-based footprint recognition.
Namita Lokare just started her PhD in Electrical Engineering this fall but is already working with staff from a company named Wildtrack (www.wildtrack.org) which has developed a non-invasive Footprint Identification Technique (FIT). Animals have unique feet, in the same way that humans have unique fingerprints and this process can identify endangered animals at the species, individual, age-class and sex levels. This allows researchers to monitor their status and work with decision-makers in environmental and conservation sciences to implement effective policies.
Once researchers have identified and measured features on the footprint, statistical software provided by SAS completes the identification of the animal. WildTrack staff are actively working with SAS staff on this project. Their algorithm is quite accurate, but requires humans to analyze the footprints, and the process of individually identifying the features of the footprint is very time consuming.
In attempt to speed up the process, Lobaton, Snyder and Lokare are developing image analysis algorithms to automate the feature measurement process. In the past, the footprints have been obtained using conventional cameras. In this photograph, the NC State researchers are shown using a three-dimensional camera to measure both extent and depth of the footprints. The work, if successful, will help to more rapidly identify individual animals, track them, and lead to improvements in the monitoring of their health.