Quocirca's Straight Talking: Branching out

Branch offices of large organisations - whether retail chains, banks or government departments - have individual technological needs. Quocirca's Bob Tarzey looks at the new products that could each have their IT headaches.

Managing IT is a headache for businesses with lots of branches. Consider the huge retail chains with thousands of outlets or large retail banks with a presence in every major town. And it's not just commercial organisations; many government departments often have thousands of regional outposts managing things like benefit payments, health care and justice.

Employees in such branches carry out mainly transactional work, executing a set of predefined tasks such as ordering stock, making loans or dolling out benefits. The computing devices used in branches are often very specialised - point of sales (POS) terminals in stores or cashpoints (ATMs to some readers) in banks and so on. Even where plain old PCs are the main device used they often run a limited set of specialist applications designed to do the job in hand.

Those charged with managing the branch computing requirements of such organisations turn to specialists. You can't wander into PC World and buy a POS device or a shrink-wrapped application for calculating welfare payments. Anyway the buyers will have volume supply arrangements with their specialist suppliers.

But there is one area of branch computing where the requirements are the same regardless of the type of industry being served - that is the way the branch is linked to the headquarters. Communications between the branch and HQ are fairly straightforward. The two need to communicate by phone and email and share data. For example, a retailer will need to collect sales information and send out price updates. There is also an increasing requirement for video, either collecting surveillance information or pushing content for in-store advertising.

One other critical need for communication between the two is the ability for HQ to manage the IT systems of the branch where there will be no, or very limited, technical resources. This aspect of branch computing has evolved so much that today linking a new branch back to HQ can often be carried out by a non-specialist who just unpacks the networking device and plugs it in. The device then automatically configures itself and pings HQ to let it know it is there - this is called 'zero touch deployment'.

Not so long ago all this would have been complex involving multiple network connections and a number of different devices. But now with the widespread use of IP networks, a single network router can be used to do all this, even providing the telephone link between the branch and HQ using IP telephony. The routers that do all this for a branch only need a subset of the functionality that would be required to provide the networking requirements of a small business.

Routers designed for small businesses take care of access and content security as well as directing network traffic - this is called 'unified threat management'. For branch computing this is usually not necessary. Access control can be managed by HQ and email can be pre-scanned by HQ before it is read in the branch. In many cases, there is no good reason for transactional workers in branches to be browsing the web, so users can be prevented from downloading bad content. A router designed specifically for branch computing should be able to carry out a limited set of tasks securely and efficiently and be easy to configure and manage remotely.

A new product has been launched this week by a company called NetD which aims to exploit this specific requirement. NetD only has one product, the SG-8, which it calls a 'unified services gateway'. It is designed specifically for branch networking and, claims NetD, is able to support thousands of users if necessary. They will be bringing out scaled-down devices at a later date. The SG-8 is designed specifically to provide all the networking requirements of a branch - including voice - efficiently, securely and cost effectively.

A product designed from the bottom up with just branch networking in mind, and with the full capabilities of today's IP networks and what businesses expect of them, is going to give more generic offerings a run for their money. The venture capitalists behind NetD clearly think so, which is perhaps the most impressive thing about the whole enterprise. NetD raised VC funding in early 2003, when the IT industry was only just starting to recover from a huge slump that had affected the networking sector more than any other.

One big problem for NetD is that networking giant Cisco has also been hard at work for the last three years building its own new range of routers targeted at small and mid-sized businesses and the branches of larger businesses. Their Integrated Service Routers (ISR), launched in September 2004, have pretty much the same capability. Cisco already has seven different devices capable of supporting branches of various sizes. Juniper's J-Series and Enterasys's XRS Routers can do much of the data networking bits but not the IP telephony for which separate devices are required.

These big vendors obviously carry less risk as they are well established and likely to be around for the long term, whist NetD as a start-up is yet to prove its viability. The big vendors have their established supply and support channels, which can be critical to provisioning new branches rapidly and fixing them when things go wrong. Having said that, if NetD is onto something, it may not be around that long anyway - there are some very acquisitive companies out there which are always looking for interesting new products.

As more and more organisations with large numbers of branches turn to IP networks to provide all their communication requirements, it is refreshing to see a new company come along and rethink the way branch networking is configured and managed. A major rollout with an unproven vendor might be too high risk for many - but it has to be worth taking a look before handing over yet another order for networking products to the big guys.