Who wins in networking in 2025 and beyond?

In this third team, we also find vendors most interested and active in the IoT opportunity, two of which are usually not considered enterprise vendors at all: Ericsson and Nokia. Both these companies are actively pursuing new IoT strategies, and while they are surely hoping that broad public-sensor IoT will deploy and create a service provider network opportunity they can address, both are also emphasizing private 5G, which is an on-ramp to an enterprise IoT strategy. In any event, public-sensor IoT would surely drive major changes and open major new application opportunities that would drive new enterprise network needs.

It’s pretty clear that change is the real issue here. Will networking change, or will it remain as it was? Will something new come along to add to the size of the network spending pie? Nothing new? Networks commoditize completely. Team One wins by shrinking itself—layoffs. Team Two wins by exploiting commoditization. Broadcom can sell chips, but with no new traffic, not much new revenue is available. HPE is tied to a lower-margin networking business. If there’s no change on the table, Team Three is looking for commodity niches in a commodity market, not a happy situation either. In the no-change scenario, Team One wins a hollow victory.

Networks deliver information that’s created, maintained, and analyzed by applications. If anything is going to transform networks, it has to be something that tied to a different kind of delivery—a delivery of a budget. Business benefits, in other words, and a lot of them if we want a network transformation funded. We’ve been looking at network technology instead, and looking at it all wrong. You don’t invent a technology and then try to fit it to as much as possible; the candidates will all be status-quo elements that won’t generate transformational budgets. Coloring outside the lines, way outside the lines, is essential. Find a major benefit, then find what can address it. The 2025 winner will be the team that does this best, and changes the game for us all.

There is hope here for networking, and network vendors in general, but realizing the potential means stepping a bit out, or perhaps up? Above the network stack, we’ve always recognized the domain of the application. The advantage network vendors could have here is that it’s pretty likely that there is a strong network connection to the two most promising “transformational” applications, because both rely on a form of IoT, and a lot of it. And, of course, a lot of IoT means a lot of new network opportunity.

Before you think I’m trying to restart something that, in tech years, is maybe as old as dinosaurs, let me point out that the original notion of IoT, which was a broad and universal collection of sensors and intelligence, has never been realized. We’ve done the easy IoT, the stuff contained in buildings, instead. Not surprisingly, that hasn’t lived up to the lofty goals initially set for IoT. The real IoT could generate billions in network opportunity, in just two broad applications, and it’s in reach to all our teams, though some will have to reach further than others.

So who is that winner? Cisco’s incumbency and take-no-risk strategy is likely to make it the most successful player next year, and if the question was “who wins in 2025” the answer would be Cisco. But there’s that pesky “and beyond” to consider.