Bandwidth.
It’s been such a ubiquitous part of the networking landscape for so long that it has become easy to overlook its importance and get tied in to an outdated view of how it affects a business. With the current crop of new technologies enabling businesses to be more and more competitive, companies are going to have to change how they think about bandwidth.
To illustrate just how pervasive the need for increased bandwidth is likely to become, and how our concept of bandwidth usage needs to change, we present here a pair of scenarios, both of which will be very familiar to any modern corporation.
After a Merger
When acquiring another company, what is usually important are assets such as locations, branding, and customer relationships. What is seldom of as much significance are the business processes and personnel. After merging with another company, it is often desirable to spread experienced staff from the parent company as far as possible throughout the organization to make for a smoother transition, and to create satisfying new customer relationships. One of the most cost effective ways to do this is through telepresence solutions such as video conferencing.
It is not usually necessary for experienced employees to be physically present in various locations. What is needed is their knowledge, authority, or experience. Video conferencing allows key staff to be “present” at many different locations without any of the requisite travel time.
In the right circumstances this can increase productivity enormously. This type of solution, of course, requires enough bandwidth to carry the necessary audio and video signals for all affected staff.
Post-Modern Customer Contact
In many industries there has been a trend towards automating as much of the customer interaction process as possible. Modern customer contact is automated. This helps reduce costs associated with staffing, of course, but often at the expense of satisfied customers. Although fine for “business-as-usual” interactions, it is not a particularly good solution for anything out of the ordinary.
A new development in the area of automated customer interactions, whether through kiosks or online, is the ability for customers to deal with their normal business through the automated channels, but speak to a live customer support employee should circumstances warrant it. Post-modern customer contact is a hybrid of automation and personal service.
This type of network demand is difficult to forecast, though, and can be prone to spiking – with sudden and drastic differences between normal and peak usage. The solution to this issue is scalable bandwidth. Bandwidth scalability means having excess capacity available when needed without having to pay for it when it is not being used.
Conclusion
We are already seeing bandwidth needs changing in ways that could never have been predicted 5 years ago. What is clear at present is that a key bandwidth issue in the future is going to be flexibility. More bandwidth is still going to be necessary, but maybe not all the time, and not necessarily to and from the same places. And it probably won’t be used in the same ways it is now. Maintaining bandwidth flexibility is certain to be one of the most important challenges facing businesses in the near future.