SDN provides huge benefits for industry leader
IntegrationQA has established itself as a leader in optimising the delivery of software with a strong focus on quality in the delivery of agile IT and quality assurance.
Chris Wellington, managing director of IntegrationQA understands that in order to maintain their leadership position, a lot of technologies need to be utilised.
"We are constantly looking for new trends and technologies, and have partnered with virtualisation technology leaders including Nuage Networks (Network Virtualisation), Parasoft (Service Virtualisation) and Delphix (Database Virtualisation)," Wellington says.
Recently, there has been a strong market trend to utilise the cloud for IT testing, which means the use of the cloud greatly benefits the business of IntegrationQA.
"It allows customers to access our services and products in a much more consumable way," says Wellington. "Given it's a new technology, customers are looking at how they might get started with the cloud and the mix of on-premise infrastructure so we are seeing a growth in demand for our advice and consultancy around best practice."
Software defined networking (SDN) has had significant benefits to the cloud and data center networking, as it enables organisations to be truly continuous from the infrastructure layer up.
"Network provisioning has been a issue that has historically slowed down agility and speed in organisations," asserts Wellington. "It enables organisations to work towards dev-ops models as well as continuous delivery."
Wellington affirms that SDN and SDWAN technologies have huge capabilities and are significant areas he is looking into to assist his business.
"Both to enable customers to access our products in the cloud securely and seamlessly as well as enable non-production environments we work in day-in day-out to be provisioned faster and more consistently," he says.
Wellington asserts that one of the main benefits of using SDN for this role rather than traditional networking technologies is simply that it will be much faster, giving you control of policy and configuration instead of inspecting and finding out what is in the environment.
"You can provision from a known baseline with confidence and also have a greater confidence you are building/deploying and verifying in an environment that looks like production," Wellington says.
In terms of the future and what potential SDN holds for his business, Wellington states he sees it as a true enabler, which will allow faster delivery to customers with reduced costs and greater confidence in the actual delivery.
Wellington also affirms that he sees SDN as a true opportunity as it is only in its infancy, and that it will be a very important asset in increasing the pace of delivery in the IT industry.
