Google gets into the network management game

Internet giant Google has unveiled its latest forays into the telecoms world in the form of its Network Connectivity Center.

In his blog announcing the new product, Google’s Product Manager for Cloud Networking, Rohith Ramkumar, describes NCC as ‘a revolution in simplifying on-prem and cloud networking’. It seems to be an attempt to provide a single console for a business of any size to manage all its networks on a global basis. Sounds pretty ambitious, but Google is one of the few companies that could pull something like this off.

“Network Connectivity Center serves as a vantage point to seamlessly connect VPNs, partner and dedicated interconnects, as well as third-party routers and Software-Defined WANs, helping you optimize connectivity, reduce operational burden and lower costs—wherever your applications or users may be,” wrote Ramkumar.

Google announced a partnership with Cisco over an SD-WAN Cloud Hub and that has been extended to this new thing. “Our latest integration not only extends the Cisco SD-WAN fabric to Google Cloud to automate provisioning of site-to-cloud connectivity effortlessly, but also gives customers the choice of using Google Cloud for providing a highly reliable, high performance global cloud network for site-to-site connectivity that can be deployed in minutes,” said JL Valente, VP of Product Management for Cisco Enterprise Routing, SD-WAN and Cloud Networking.

The Cisco angle only serves to highlight the insidious creep of the webscale giants into the telecom space. There was once a time when CSPs might have fancied themselves to provide these kinds of network management services but no longer, it seems.