Initial implementation of a digital product vision
PoCs are essential for innovative products: they provide reliable data for financial-economic modelling and usually calls for noticeable changes in product design
By testing the selected technologies and the overall product design in pilot projects, it is possible at an early stage to understand the actual unit cost of the product for the given characteristics and whether it meets market requirements.
As a rule, pilot results require significant changes to the product design and the adoption of alternative technological solutions.
To achieve this, ongoing analytical support of the project is necessary. Only based on pilot data, and after making the required changes to the product design, is it possible to develop a realistic financial–economic model and a product development roadmap.
Here are two examples of our approach to adjusting a product design and economy by means of PoC: UTM aaS and Bandwidth on Demand.
Next Generation Firewall / Unified Threat Management (NGFW/UTM) aaS
PoC and changes to initial design
Limitations of initial design caused inability to achieve the required per-unite cost and QoS of UTMaaS:
To deliver cleaned (filtered) traffic from the data center, where a VM with an NGFW is deployed, to the boundary of the customer company’s local network, an expensive dedicated link is required.
NGFW is a compute-intensive function that requires significant resources, especially on general-purpose servers, and even more so with an additional virtualization layer.
Deployment in IaaS (VM) effectively does not allow for proper elasticity management.
Changes to initial design:
Distributed deployment of UTM/NGFW function in edge and core datacenters, in combination with load balancing between edge and core DCs
Scheme of PoC
Scheme of changes to initial design
Long-howl Bandwidth on Demand for multi clouds
Scheme of Capacity on Demand PoC for dynamic load balancing between DCs of independent cloud providers located in different time zones
PoC and changes to initial design
The PoC demonstrated the technical feasibility of interconnecting the clouds of two independent providers using different hypervisors via an operator that did not have SDN prior to the start of the project, without making any changes to the data center management systems of the cloud providers.
The PoC also provided cost benchmarks for developing an application for an SDN controller, which were incorporated into the financial and economic model assessing the feasibility of deploying such an application on the network of a terrestrial cable system operator.
The financial and economic model showed strong project payback.
