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Are We There Yet?
Indeed, MPLS is new for everyone, so safeguards are good insurance. Moreover, while the technology itself is mature, commercial MPLS offerings are still in the ramp-up stage, according to Forrester's Pierce. For instance, few providers have fully meshed MPLS backbones, which means that IP packets may be forced to make several hops to reach their destination. This can affect the network's overall ability to recover and route around problems and delivery times.
Further, while MPLS carriers provide secure intra-company connections over their own backbones (not the Internet) some do not yet support network-based Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) VPN connectivity. This limits customers' ability to provide secure connections between their MPLS-connected sites and extranet partners and mobile users.
CIOs also say that service providers need to give customers more dynamic and granular control over bandwidth allocation and quality of service. "Applications come and go; there are acquisitions and restructurings, all of which require dynamic changes in the organization and the flexibility to adjust the network infrastructure to support those changes," Byram Healthcare's Entrup says. "We have yet to see the ability to throttle, turn up or turn down circuits in real time as we need bandwidth."
MPLS is clearly in the fuzzy area of its adoption curve, where the benefits are within sight but the pitfalls remain obscured. And there's no question that companies will eventually get there; the technology itself is forward-looking and dynamic enough to support a growing company's telecom needs for at least the next few years.
The CIOs we spoke with expressed confidence that MPLS is a worthy bet for their midsized companies. "Once we rolled out MPLS, our network was a lot more stable," O'Neal Steel's Gooldrup reports. "With frame relay, we seldom went a month without some kind of outage; with MPLS, we've had none." In addition, telecom costs went down, even after the company installed a backup DSL line at each location. "When we can upgrade our network and still reduce cost, that's great."
"Going forward, we don't want same old, same old," says Barnes. "Frame relay was the way to go in the '80 and '90s. Why lock ourselves into an old technology for the next three years? For us, the time for MPLS is now."
Elizabeth Horwitt is a contributing writer based in Waban, Mass. To comment on this story, email editor@ciodecisions.com.
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