Optimizing Networks for Digital Transformation: Elevate the efficiency, speed, innovation, and profitability of your operation with a service-centric network that speaks the language of business and supports global policy end-to-end.

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Optimizing Networks for Digital Transformation: Elevate the efficiency, speed, innovation, and profitability of your operation with a service-centric network that speaks the language of business and supports global policy end-to-end.

EXECUTIVE OVERVIEW: Digital transformation is an increasingly popular buzzword in enterprise IT these days. While it can mean different things to different people, its potential to streamline processes, improve velocity, spark innovation, and enhance business performance has become a compelling draw for organizations of all kinds.

At 128 Technology, we define digital transformation simply as the process of enhancing a given business function through the use of modern technology. And to us, digital transformation usually involves two very important components. The first is a service, such as an inventory system, a video feed, or an analytics application that can be better enabled by technology. This can be an existing service or an entirely new one. The other is the fuel for that service —business data — which often needs to move fluidly from one point to another to be at its most useful.

When organizations kick off a service-based transformation project, they often encounter challenges that have the potential to impede, or even derail, their efforts. These obstacles include:

• A lack of common ground between business and technology teams on the pathway, process, or goals for the project

• Technology shortcomings that prevent improvements to a service or the delivery of its data

• A lack of agility and the inability to administer, secure, manage or modify a newly-transformed service on a global basis

At 128 Technology, we believe that better digital transformation begins with a smarter network. This means evolving the network into one that is service-oriented, enabling resources to be provisioned in real business language, and ensuring that consistent, global policies can be enforced across all network segments. By beginning their digital transformation efforts with some much-needed network enhancements, organizations can avoid many of the common pitfalls they might otherwise face.

128 Technology provides a service-centric networking platform that supports provisioning in business language and makes it simple to provision and enforce global policy.

Optimizing Networks for Digital Transformation: Elevate the efficiency, speed, innovation, and profitability of your operation with a service-centric network that speaks the language of business and supports global policy end-to-end.

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CHALLENGES:

One of the greatest threats to a successful digital transformation project is the reality that no two are exactly alike. The business models, processes, experiences, and applications that are being addressed are typically just as unique as the organizations they support. Many organizations have accepted and even embraced this notion, choosing to approach things on a service-by-service basis. While pragmatic, this approach can quickly expose the system-wide challenges that pose a common risk to all transformation projects.

Of all the universal issues we’ve seen that impede digital transformation, the greatest may be the language barrier that exists between business and IT teams. While business teams are talking about their goals for productivity, agility,

and velocity improvements and naming the business services that are most linked to them – IT is referencing router names, port numbers, or IP addresses, as well as addressing traditional functional requirements like bandwidth, latency, and packet loss. To make matters worse, the IT resources linked to a given service often change from one network segment to another, and different staff often manage different pieces of the network. This requires IT teams to maintain complex spreadsheets that map business-critical services to the routers, port numbers, IP addresses, and performance required to make them work. It all adds up to an extremely tedious approach to service management and an inadequate foundation for digital transformation. To fix it, the network needs to change.

128T SOLUTION: To help simplify and accelerate digital transformation, 128 Technology provides a service-centric networking platform that supports provisioning in business language and makes it simple to provision and enforce global policy. The following examples highlight how a smarter approach to networking can be truly transformative for businesses, optimizing the production and delivery of products, speeding transactions, improving IT operations, and enabling new revenue generating services.

Business Use Cases:

• Remote Telemetry: For an oil company with drilling operations at numerous well sites, it is critical that data on each well’s yield is delivered to the data center for analysis as quickly as possible. But these remote sites often rely on satellite links to relay this data, and performance limitations often slow down its delivery. By defining a service for the delivery of this data and optimizing the sessions that transport it across the satellite links, the analysis is accelerated and yields are improved.

• Production Optimization: In the concrete business, timing is everything. By deploying a truly transformational video service to monitor when trucks are coming in and out of a job site, one concrete provider was able to more precisely time its deliveries, while significantly reducing waste. A session-oriented network and global policy enforcement help ensure that these video streams reach the central concrete plant, even when wireless connectivity is less than optimal.

• Application Acceleration: In the case of a retail location with intelligent terminals at each of its storefronts and a cloud-based point-of-sale database within its data center, time is literally money. When data transmission takes too long, the terminal runs slowly and customers reconsider their purchases. That’s where a service-centric network helps optimize directional sessions for the point-of-sale data, keeping the transactions flowing and the line moving.

• Remote Troubleshooting: One company in the midst of a large-scale digital transformation effort decided that it was time for IT to transform, too. Now, when a remote user calls the help desk to ask why a payroll system or a social media analytics application is running poorly, IT support no longer needs to trace the port numbers and IP addresses for the service. Agents are able to quickly find and troubleshoot the affected service using real business language to solve the problem fast.

• New Service Opportunities: For one company in the transportation business, satellite connectivity is required to operate its fleet of ships. But the company recently discovered that by optimizing the delivery of its data over these links and segmenting the network, the remaining bandwidth could be used for a new revenue-generating service. Now the company offers network connectivity to its customers in support of their operations at sea.

781.203.8400 | www.128technology.com | 200 Summit Drive, Suite 600, Burlington MA 01803

ABOUT 128 TECHNOLOGY128 Technology makes your network do what your business needs, by changing the way networks work. Our professional grade software teaches routers the language of applications and services, letting them understand the requirements of individual services and segments, and adapt the network dynamically to deliver what the business needs, when and where it needs it. We make routers Session Smart™, enabling enterprise customers and service providers to create a service-centric fabric that’s more simple, agile, and secure, delivering better performance at a lower cost.

Service-oriented data model: The structure of the 128T data model and system architecture is designed around services as opposed to network-layer attributes. This helps businesses, IT teams, and even end users ensure that the network is configured to support the needs of mission-critical services and applications. This also helps ensure that IT staff can troubleshoot issues quickly and adjust network resources as business priorities change.

Provisioning in business language: When a new service is created on the 128T Platform, IT professionals can give it a unique name that states what it does in clear and simple business language. Now, rather than looking through a manually-maintained spreadsheet for the mapping between the “cameras” and finding the IP addresses of

the routers it touches and ports that need to be open, IT can simply search for “cameras” on its management console to view and manage any network resources associated with it.

Global policy management: Instead of provisioning policies on a single router and repeating the process for routers in every network segment, the 128T solution enables end-to-end policy enforcement. This means a service and its corresponding policies can be defined across the network to ensure the necessary levels of performance, security, and availability are maintained wherever they’re needed. This helps businesses more easily meet and demonstrate compliance with their own requirements and industry regulations.

781.203.8400 | www.128technology.com | 200 Summit Drive, Suite 600, Burlington MA 01803

ABOUT 128 TECHNOLOGY128 Technology makes your network do what your business needs, by changing the way networks work. Our professional grade software teaches routers the language of applications and services, letting them understand the requirements of individual services and segments, and adapt the network dynamically to deliver what the business needs, when and where it needs it. We make routers Session Smart™, enabling enterprise customers and service providers to create a service-centric fabric that’s more simple, agile, and secure, delivering better performance at a lower cost.

SUMMARY: The 128T solution can make digital transformation more efficient and effective than is currently possible with today’s hardware-constrained networks. That’s because 128 Technology is making the network a service-centric resource, getting business and IT professionals speaking the same language, and enabling global policy end-to-end. With smarter networks, organizations are constantly finding new ways to move faster, perform better, and do more than they ever have.

KEY FEATURES: The 128T Session Smart Router offers several networking features that form a strong foundation for

a wide range of digital transformation projects.