Celebrating 10 Years of Enable

The founding of Enable Network Services on January 17th, 2014, marked a new chapter in my professional journey, which was already rich with 15 years of experience with some of the world's most complex networks. My experience had revealed two key insights: firstly, Service Provider Networks confront challenges that differ significantly from those of major Enterprise networks, and secondly, there was a notable lack of specialised support organisations focused predominantly or exclusively on the SP network sector. Armed with this understanding, I was motivated to create a company that focuses on Service Providers, aiming to cultivate unique competencies and offer genuine value. 

In the intervening 10 years, we have discovered that traditional SP technologies have become more prevalent in the largest Enterprises, while SP networks now require ever more specialist capabilities. Technologies such as MPLS, EVPN and 100G Ethernet services are now relevant to these Enterprises, while SPs need Carrier Grade NAT (it’s in the name), BNGs, wholesale supporting infrastructure, automation and instrumentation at scale, support models that are flexible and effective, specialist hardware for different use cases, guidance in navigating ever more complex software licensing, and the list goes on. NetDevOps and programmability is a key differentiator and multivendor interoperability and implementation abstraction is, post-COVID, no longer a luxury but a necessity. 

In the next 10 years, I believe we’ll be faced with some key challenges. How do we do simplify our technical solutions? How do we do more with less? And how do we continue to deliver monetisable value to the end user? Of these questions, I believe that simplification is the key. Networks are vastly complex beasts. Without doing a deep-dive into the gory technical details, incredible scale and ever-increasing business requirements are the double-headed beast that is driving networks to the brink. 

In response, we are seeing vendors and standards bodies focus relentlessly on simplification and cross-vendor standardisation. There is still a huge amount of work to be done but we are already seeing dramatic improvements in Service and Transport implementations, instrumentation, automation, and solutions adopted from traditional DevOps. I expect that several divergent solutions are coalescing and there now really is a one way is better. Segment Routing, EVPN, Streaming Telemetry, standards-based API programmable access and automated testing alongside with NFV-based intelligent service edge solutions will provide the foundation for the next generation of Service Provider networks. 

Reflecting on Enable Network Services' ten-year milestone, it's clear that our journey has been one of constant evolution and adaptation. We look forward to our continued journey and embracing these changes, focusing on specialised areas such as automation. The future presents us with the challenge of simplifying these intricate systems, aiming to provide solutions that are both efficient and valuable, and thereby ensuring our continued leadership in this ever-evolving field. 

We are grateful to our customers that have trusted us with their architecture and infrastructure decisions and implementation, and, in turn, we hope that we have made their efforts a little more effective.