SD-WAN: New Enterprise Opportunity for Telcos, or a Threat to MPLS, SDN & NFV?

Software-Defined Wide Area Networks (SD-WANs) have catapulted to prominence in the enterprise networking world in the last 12 months, driven by the growth of demand for access to cloud applications, and businesses’ desire to control WAN costs and complexity. SD-WAN may be a new “intermediary” layer in the network which has the potential to disrupt telcos’ enterprise aspirations, particularly given that it is dominated by vendors and specialist providers rather than telcos. SD-WAN may reduce operators’ MPLS and WAN services revenues and could potentially restrict future NFV/SDN opportunities. But SD-WAN also offers opportunities, where it is embraced – tactically – as part of operators’ enterprise portfolios.

Vertical Innovation Leaders: How Telstra’s Healthcare Jigsaw is Coming Together

We analyse the aggressive strategy Telstra has chosen to develop its digital healthcare business – which relies heavily on acquisitions across the whole eHealth value chain – and discuss how this fits into a wider companywide digital strategy, what it will take for Telstra to succeed in this vertical, and what insights other telcos can take away about their own digital health strategies.