Summer is a great time to attend a sporting event. If you have attended any recently, you no doubt have sampled a variety of stadium/arena food from traditional favorites, such as hot dogs and peanuts, to more modern fare including sushi and garlic fries.

While at your local stadium/arena, what would be the chances that every food item you purchased had to be sold by a different vendor and required its own customized utensil or bowl? Unlikely!  That just goes too far right?  No one would want to support that. And the complexity to manage inventory would result in significant overhead. Yet we all expect IT to provide full support for all the new devices (tablets, smart phones) that we are bringing to work.  

Why do we have those expectations for IT though?  This article in VentureBeat http://venturebeat.com/2012/06/04/byod-the-downside-is-beginning-to-show/ about bringing-your-own-device (BYOD) really made sense.  As you will see in the graphic, depending on what you brought to work, you will have a radically different user experience. I have not heard of too many executive mandates calling for all devices to perform equally, so policies will soon need to be created as to which devices or apps get supported, receive their “best effort” or are not authorized.

As the graphic clearly shows, a byproduct of BYOD is the potential loss of performance or “visibility.” Tracking and managing performance levels is now exponentially more difficult as many more devices and applications are in play. BYOD is happening in every organization right now – a common use case is when you want to find out where an IP address has been. In this example, which switch port or VLAN is that IP address associated with over time.  Here’s an example we have illustrated on our bloxHub community.

The legacy solution would be to go to your networking team and they pull out CiscoWorks and three other products and try to extrapolate the identification of the device or its location.  Much of what Infoblox is offering reflects a new way to think about the network and help IT hide complexity through Automated Network Control. Our ability to tell you where the IP address was last week, last month or even last year -- all in “one pane of glass” is the kind of visibility we believe people need for today’s complex IT environment.  You won’t see Infoblox selling food at a sporting event any day soon, but we do hope to free up our customers so that they can attend games more often.