What's more, with the convergence of data, voice and video and the varying and business critical nature of applications running in present day networks, there is a need to ensure that the applications running in the networks do not suffer congestion, delays and packet loss. This could be detrimental for the applications and result in loss of business. Rapidly changing technology and applications demand greater bandwidth and better service from the existing networks. This calls for wiser decision in terms of design and deployment of networks so that investment protection is ensured and deployed networks cater at least to near future demands, even though nobody can ensure that investment is protected forever.

Present day networks are thought of as the foundation of all computing needs of an organization and analogous to the Blood Circulation System of the Human Body.

At Tata Elxsi we follow a Solution Centric Approach compared to the traditional Product Centric approach. The important aspects of a solution centric approach is, Networks are seen as infrastructure investment, taking care of the specific needs of applications being deployed in the networks both present and the future. This takes care of the critical requirements like bandwidth issues, priority and QoS issues and ensures invest protection in terms of future requirements


Issues in designing and deploying networks

Earlier, organizations and enterprises were like isolated islands of networks with Local area networks (LAN) at different places being connected with a low bandwidth Wide area connectivity (WAN) and generally catered to low-end data traffic. But with deployment of Intranets, Extranets and connectivity to the Internet, organizations and enterprises are no more isolated islands of network and they are becoming a part of global networks. Also the earlier definitions of LAN, MAN (Metropolitan Area Networks) and WAN are fading and for an end user, the present day networks are one seamless connection, providing access to the applications either from the office LAN, or from home or while on move.

This presents a greater challenge in designing and deployment of networks, in terms of access technologies, Security and integrity of valuable data, preventing abuse of Networks both internal and external. Moreover, to address all the concerns of present day networks, the solution centric approach, which integrates the best of the breed of products from different principals, is the need of the day.