We spoke to Sylvain Quartier who is the Senior Vice President of Product Management & Markets at InfoVista and oversees InfoVista’s global product strategy.
InfoVista is the leading provider of cost-effective network performance orchestration solutions that help communications service providers, mobile operators and large enterprises meet the challenge of providing top-quality user experience (UX) while increasing the capital efficiency of their network infrastructure.
Eighty percent of the world’s largest communications service providers (CSPs), more than 250 mobile operators, countless global enterprises and public administrations all rely upon InfoVista’s solutions to deliver industry-best IT services dedicated to optimal network performance.
Keep reading to find out more about Sylvain Quartier, working at InfoVista and the future of the industry.
What does InfoVista focus on as a business?
InfoVista is a medium sized company in Europe with around 350 employees. Our market is divided into two main markets. The first one is global service providers, and then especially in mobility. This takes up 60% of our business. Our second biggest market are enterprises. It’s important to know that a bit more than half of the company is writing software for Mobile Network Performance.
What did you do before InfoVista?
My background is in Engineering as I have a master’s degree in network and system engineering from the Engineering School of Information and Digital Technologies (EFREI) in Paris, France. I started off working as a Support Engineer. Before I joined InfoVista in 2002 my industry experience included various engineering, pre-sales engineering and product management roles, including head of product management at TraceOne, a global leader in collaborative and SaaS solutions for the private label and branded goods industry, technical officer and co-founder of Clariteam, a managed service provider supporting quality of service and performance analysis of business IT systems, and sales engineer at ARCHE Communications, a market-leading French value-added reseller of ICT and network solutions to public and private sector organizations and communications service providers. At InfoVista I worked on a number of different positions within R&D and product management.
My role now is to position and make a right acquisition and product evolution for InfoVista in the enterprise market.
What do you like the most about InfoVista?
What I like the most is to meet customers. Meet the customers, understand their challenges and find the right solution for them. Especially with the products we have now we have a lot of customers who love our products. It’s very important in our business that our customers are satisfied, because we are solving their application challenges.
What I also like is that we exist longer than 20 years now and not everyone, but a big group of people who were there at the beginning are still here. We have very good interaction with our employees and the executive team is a great team. Of course, as in every company there are sometimes some challenges and difficult decisions to make. But, I think we can all be proud of the achievements of InfoVista. Another thing I love very much at InfoVista is the opportunity to innovate, bring our ideas to the table and execute them on our market.
How is the company culture like at InfoVista?
We have a very fast paced culture. We grew a lot in a short time, we went from 250 to 750 people in a few years. At InfoVista the customers come first. In the end when you have to make a decision on the product or allocate the products or make a planning you want to make sure the customer is happy.
What is very interesting is that we have a lot of different cultures at InfoVista. Even though we are small, we have offices in 20 different countries and have customers in 170 countries. So, if you love to travel, when working at InfoVista you can visit customers everywhere in the world. We are a company that is very rich on the culture side.
When did you first hear about SDN/NFV?
I remember it well, I started to hear about SDN and NFV around 2010. At this time we were still the original team at InfoVista. There haven’t been any acquisitions yet at this time. We had one product that was necessary for network performance. This product was sold to service providers. So, we were very close to service providers especially everything that was IP and MPLS focused.
We saw this revolution coming from service providers who started to ask us about controlled network performance. They started about how to start to automate the network. How to implement and adapt your own network solutions.
As a lot of new technologies in networking, there is a lot of excitement about it. At the beginning you start to read news papers about it and go to conferences etc. And after that it becomes a reality. Personally, I start to see the real usage of SDN and NFV by service providers in enterprises now. We did a lot of lab tests and data tests and we done tests with real deployments. We heard about it quite a long time ago, but it always takes time to implement. Take for example IPV6, it took a while before that became common.
Today we start to see SDN/NFV more and more and it is becoming more common that companies like us develop our own VNF to become compatible in this new model of networking.
What were your first initial thoughts about SDN and NFV?
At first, I thought about the opportunities of SDN. But there are also risks. As I said we have 300 service providers that we work with and the risk is that if they all move to use this. Then we have the risk that new competition is coming.
It is an opportunity because when you have a bunch of customers who work with you, then you are very well positioned and can make progression with your products. And of course, make more revenue.
When we started to see this movement, we created a task force at InfoVista to adapt our software to SDN/NFV. And we did research together with service providers. It was an exciting time but it moved slower than we expected. It didn’t move slow because of the technical side of it, but companies adapting to it goes slow.
What are the biggest opportunities and threats in the SDN/NFV space?
Today, the opportunity of SDN/NFV for service providers is to become agile for the end customer enterprise. What I mean by that is that each time when we meet an enterprise they appreciate that the Service Provider provides SLA, they appreciate that the Service Providers are always there when they have problems, but they are all systematically complaining and this goes for every country. They complain about the complexity from service providers. So, the promise of SDN/NFV is to make the network agile.
The major weakness would probably be the complexity to find the same way to communicate. Because SDN/NFV it is the world, or the ecosystem. You want to have a UCP from Juniper that will be orchestrated by Ciena Blueplanet on which you will have a firewall from Fortinet. On here you already have 3 different modules. So, the difficulty is to only communicate on the same protocol. Which is quite complex. At the end the real challenge will be to maintain that.
What do you like the most about the industry?
What I like the most is that the digital transformation is inevitable for large enterprises. You have to listen to the customer how to transform their business in the way they sell, the way they produce, the way they approach customers and even their business model. Now through us a business can become more agile through SDN/NFV and SD-WAN and the network can be driven by applications. This is possible because now you can adapt your network to applications that then serves the application adapting to a business transformation for enterprises. The customer has then a new way to go to market, a new way to sell and a new way to produce. And this is how a network can become more agile.
Who do you see as the biggest innovators in the SDN space?
AT&T are starting very soon in SDN and we start to see them very active in the market. So, I would definitely say they are good innovators.
We also see Ciena Blueplanet as a good innovator. They are very active to bring all the controlled orchestration channels to the market. They are being used by many service providers and I think they have a good approach.
I also see Chinese companies as an innovator especially in ZTE. They are very active to bring a cost-effective platform to the market and they are very performance oriented. Huawei is also very active in China and of course, some traction from the traditional Network vendors such as Ciso and Juniper. But the technology gap between new comers and dominant players is becoming smaller and smaller. SD-WAN is a good opportunity, closely attached to NFV-SDN, will redistribute the leadership position in the coming 5 years! In China they always benefit from new tech waves and take the opportunity to become innovators.
Where do you see the future of Networking going?
Over the last years we have seen a lot of solutions change. I think there will be more very cost-effective solutions for all your business.
I also think that in the future everything will be mobilized. And that mobility will drive agility. You can be anywhere with your device and will have a network and internet. And that it will be cheaper to project data and projecting the mobile performance. We can’t let all traffic and internet like this without guarantee of performance.
Who I see as a future winner is someone who can guarantee the traffic is secure and that the performance is guaranteed end-to-end and this will be the future leader in network mobility.
What implications do emerging technologies have on our modern day “network Engineers”?
I think that any Engineer in the future will know at least a minimum about security. This is vital. We are used to having a Security Engineer being dedicated to that but now every engineer has to understand security.
An interesting direction for a young engineer is to be concerned about global warming. It’s interesting to see a developer that is concerned about how we can develop a greener planet. It’s about optimizing the cloud and saving energy. We are having more and more cloud services and computing requirements that It’s also more and more important to develop software that tries to optimize the use of energy. And of course, everything is Cloud based. So, you have to think any software will be cloud first.
It’s also important for every Engineer to learn to code. It’s important to have a minimum skill in coding. The way the internet works everything is done by an algorithm. I would definitely recommend learning to code. I’ve learnt to code 25 years ago and I continue on a regular basis to train myself on new coding trends. It’s very easy to auto-train on the Internet now. Codingwise Java is the route to everything. When you master Java you will most likely learn any other language.
Do you think the need for a Traditional Network Engineer will go away?
No, I don’t think so. It’s interesting to see because when we were creating InfoVista we were all still young engineers and now many years later (now that we are old Engineers haha) when a new engineer joins the company they have new and fresh ideas. So, it’s important that new Engineers join the company in different technologies. And on top of that I want to add that it’s very important to consider to constantly refresh your knowledge. Constantly re-train yourself. You can now do this easily online. It’s very important in technology to stay on top of what is happening in the industry.
Would you say it is better to be a generalist than an expert?
Both are interesting, and I think it’s to each engineer themselves to take the decision to become more of a generalist or an expert. It might be good to be a generalist when you start because you will discover a lot of the enterprise world. Here at InfoVista some of our top sales guys are Engineers. They are moving around the company from Engineering, to product management etc. You have to be very open-minded when you start. To work in this industry you have to be devoted and passionate about technology.
I think a good thing in the future is that a lot of doors are open for Engineers, they can move into business, solely focus on technology or work on-site of customers. But we still need experts as well. Here at InfoVista we have a few of them and each one of them is critical. We’ve got experts on for example IP, NFV and an expert who is specialised in platforms and analytics. But It’s all about personal preference if you want to be a generalist or an expert.
What is the biggest difficulty when recruiting for InfoVista?
Location. In France it’s not easy to recruit because you have less mobility. Another difficulty is just to find the profile you are looking for. It’s a very demanding segment. There are more and more Engineers but there is also more and more demand. It’s not easy to find the right person, there is a lot of competition in the market as well.
If you could give one piece of advice to a Network Engineer what would it be?
A strong recommendation would be to stay connected to how the world is going. Focus globally and not just on your own country, stay open-minded. With the global world trade, you can find the best path for your career. Find the best place in the world for you where you can express your abilities best.