Design of a digital product vision
We believe that to design a product in accordance to requirements of a targeted market segment is complicated, but the most promising approach
Three steps are needed to implement this approach:
To quantitively access the potential of a targeted market segment, considering it as the outcome part of financial-economic model of a product.
To select optimal technologies for a product
development based on technical and economic requirements of a targeted market segment.
To define a product B2B2X value chain optimal for achieving technical and economic requirements of a targeted market segment.
Here are two examples of our implemented approach to product development tailored to the requirements of the target market segment: UTM aaS and Bandwidth on Demand.
Next Generation Firewall / Unified Threat Management (NGFW/UTM) aaS
Requirements of the targeted market segment
The TCO of hardware-based UTM is lower than that of UTMaaS over a typical average hardware lifecycle of 5 years.
However, UTM-mode performance of the most affordable device, the FortiGate 30D/E from the most accessible UTM vendor Fortinet, is 20–50 Mbps, which is excessive for 83% of B2B broadband (BB) connections in Russia.
Under certain conditions, the UTMaaS model makes it possible to achieve UTM coverage equal to broadband coverage, which is not possible with on-premise hardware UTM solutions.
UTMaaS pricing for a low per-capita GDP should be 4–5 times lower than in the US, similar to broadband pricing differences; only then can the same level of market penetration be achieved.
Fixed broadband B2B connections breakdown by the speed of connections in a low per-capita GDP country
NGFW/UTM penetration rate in USA and in a low per-capita GDP country
Initial design and value chain
Full automation of service lifecycle management using a MANO platform and service chaining technology.
Proprietary OSS/BSS components required for service delivery, integrated with the operator’s BSS.
Minimal qualification requirements for the customer’s personnel due to the use of preconfigured templates.
Over-the-air (OTA) CPE firmware updates instead of replacing the customer’s CPE.
A revenue-sharing model within the cooperative service value chain: UTM vendor, operator, and MANO/OSS/BSS software developer.
UTM aaS initial design concept: deploying UTM in virtual machine at hyperscale cloud
Long-howl Bandwidth on Demand for multi clouds
International network capacity breakdown between terrestrial and subsea cable systems on China – Europe route
Requirements of the targeted market segment
High competition with submarine cable systems, where price is the key selection factor. However, reducing prices in terrestrial systems to the level of submarine cable systems is technically impossible.
Solution: on-demand capacity to increase average channel utilization by 4–6 times in order to compensate for a 4× price difference.
Focus on unstable, bursty traffic typical of service traffic between hyperscalers and corporate data centers.
Solution: the ready-to-use software stack – Bandwidth on Demand App, that enables BOD implementation on non-SDN networks and integration with multiple IaaS/PaaS providers.
Price ratio between terrestrial and subsea cable systems on China – Europe route
Average load of a leased channel with fixed capacity on China – Europe route and “on demand” channel able to adjust its capacity to changes of load
Initial design and value chain
Networks are either bridged Ethernet or routed dual-stack IPv4 networks, consisting of multiple virtual or physical network segments inside a company site or public cloud.
The segments are connected through agents (or peers), which run tunnels that forward the traffic isolated from each other. At least one agent is placed in each site and all agents are connected in a mesh topology.
Additional agents could be utilized to balance the load or isolate certain networks. Links can be deactivated to ensure loop prevention and efficient routing. Agents run virtual switches and routers as GRE and WireGuard tunnel endpoints.
A dynamic configuration interface is exposed to the network controller. This central control instance knows all agents and initializes the tunnels during startup based on an external description or dynamically adapts the tunnel configurations during runtime. The deployment of the agents is the responsibility of the cloud orchestrator.
Bandwidth on Demand (BoD) app for load balancing between clouds of independent providers (hybrid clouds). We could define the hybrid cloud infrastructure use case as the virtual private cloud (VPC), in which BoD technology connects computing resources from cloud sites to the enterprise site
