Juniper Networks has released its 2023 enterprise predictions, providing insight around key trends in enterprise, highlighting three areas of focus for the upcoming year:
- A renewed focus on sustainability
- The role of automation
- The adoption of 5G
Here are the enterprise predictions: Predictions by Bruce Bennie, Juniper Network’s VP & GM for the ANZ region.
- Focus on Sustainability: This year will see sustainability become a top priority for organisations across the enterprise technology space. The industry will treat sustainability as a key factor in how organisations deliver their products and services, and how they operate. Moreover, we will see an increase in sustainability targets set by organisations and their suppliers, with many being mandated by the regulatory environments in which they operate.
There will be a bigger focus on reducing power consumption in new and existing buildouts, especially with the rising energy costs, giving suppliers who can address this efficiently a more significant advantage. There will also be a focus on longer system and product life to reduce e-waste. The industry will start talking about ‘green networking’ more actively, and ‘design for sustainability’ will be important in product development.
- Automation will transition from on-prem to as-a-Service consumption model centered around AIOps: The need to fundamentally reinvent how network automation is deployed and consumed will take shape, and the transition of network automation as a cloud-delivered and Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled model will emerge. Operators will start adopting the automation as-a-Service model to achieve business outcomes that deliver faster time-to-market and reduced operational complexity and costs.
- Adoption of private 5G will gather momentum: Private 5G is poised to become a $5.7B industry by the end of 2024, according to industry observers. Most new enterprise mobile networks will be on private 5G in 2023. In addition to service providers, we will see more cloud providers entering the private 5G market equipped with fast and standardised delivery of private networks. Security, as well as AI/ML, will still be top of the agenda for enterprises embarking on private 5G.
With the focus on automation and cloud-delivered services, new technologies like ORAN will start to feature in the private 5G discussions between operators, enterprises and vendors. We will see more trials for private 5G with the approach towards WiFi/wireless convergence and WiFi for indoors and wireless for outdoors. Enterprises will look at having a single pane of glass dashboard for managing their overall converged network. We will see the emergence of different ecosystems to achieve this.
