According to Dimension Data's 2012 Network Barometer Report, a key factor for this massive leap in early stage obsolescence is that equipment providers are moving more products to end-of-sale to allow for newer technology. At the same time, the percentage of devices sitting at the higher risk end-of-contract-renewal (EoCR) and end-of-engineering (EoE) stages has dropped dramatically from 86.2% to 20.8%.
"In the last two years, there's been a significant shift from product-oriented development to architectural-oriented development, in order to ensure support for the larger macro-technology trends such as virtualisation, video and enterprise mobility," says Michael Abendanon, general manager of network integration at Dimension Data. "A good example is Cisco's Borderless Networks product portfolio - in the past few years, every major routing and switching product family has undergone a refresh."
At the other end of the spectrum, the drop in devices at EoE and EoCR indicates that IT managers have embarked on implementing an intensive refresh cycle at the lifecycle milestones that represent real operational risk. Interestingly, at 9.2%, the percentage of devices that were last-day-of-support (LDoS) has moved only 0.2% from 9.0% 2010.
"The fact that the LDoS percentage has flatlined in the context of such movement in other milestones suggests there could be an obsolescence benchmark. We think organisations may be choosing to not refresh these devices because they've assessed that they are not carrying mission critical traffic, and therefore there's minimum risk in letting them die off. All these changes point to clients having a higher level of visibility over their network estate and an improved understanding of where to sweat assets in relation to their risk profile, and this is exactly what we wanted to see," Abendanon says.
"The pace of technology innovation means that the usable life of the capital asset is smaller than ever before. Historically, clients planned and budgeted around a seven-year depreciation of their network," Abendanon continues. "This data demonstrates that almost half of clients' network estates will be LDoS within five years. What's more, devices in earlier stages of obsolescence that still look to have usable life may be unable to support strategic technology investments such as mobility or video. Clients holding out for calendar-driven refreshes over upgrades, motivated by business agility, risk lagging behind their more future-focused competitors."
