13 April 2015

ARM is making a big move into the networking technology market with its “Intelligent Flexible Cloud” framework, and the woman responsible for articulating the company’s vision has outlined how she sees networks changing in the future.

ARM’s Charlene Marini says the company is working with 90 per cent of technology vendors in the networking space. 

ARM, which is headquartered in the UK, is dominant in the mobile devices market and now wants a larger share of the networking market. Marini says the company is working closely with “90 per cent” of the companies in the networking space, adding that she sees the nature and style of networks changing within the next few years, with the need for greater control being the driving force.

“Fundamentally, it’s about programmability and that ability to reconfigure how your network behaves and works – without days and weeks of updating specific parts of your network.

“A good example would be to be able to configure your network by flows and to update the parameters of those flows. Another good example would be, once IoT is deployed within networks, policy management around security, to be able to update policies without weeks of going into each different part of the system and updating policies.

“So it’s more about global view and global control of your network, whereas today it’s very much a piece-by-piece view of the network.”

Marini says ARM’s Intelligent Flexible Cloud is a combination of three trends: software-defined networks, network function virtualisation, and distributed intelligence.

“What we see in the network today is that each point in the network has a specific function and there are boxes built for that specific function, and the hardware and software are, again, built for that specific function.

“We see a new layer of intelligence on top that is enabling more general-purpose compute; along with that, acceleration capabilities where needed; and storage capabilities.” 

Marini says the industry is making progress in achieving greater bandwidth and speeds, but there is increasing recognition of a need to deal with the different types of data flowing around the network, mentioning the Internet of Things (IoT), which only requires narrowband and generally uses low-power devices. She believes IoT will be an area where innovations will be seen.

“IoT gateways will be one of the first areas where we see some of these new networking principles and architectures applied. What that will mean is that an IoT gateway will have more programmability, it can be orchestrated and managed in a more holistic way, instead of going into the command-line interface and using bespoke programming to manage specific boxes.”

She adds that 5G is another sector that will be at the forefront of the new style of networking and network management.

ARM has a different business model to other chipmakers in that it sells the designs for processors, as well the complementary technology around the processor, and third-party companies produce the chips. ARM doesn’t make chips itself. 

Part of ARM’s success is due to the fact that its technology was built originally to operate on low power and be as efficient as possible. “The early part of our history is very much in the embedded market,” says Marini, adding that ARM technology can be found in unexpected areas. For example, control mechanisms for hard disk drives is a strong market for the company. 

Marini, whose background is in technology and engineering companies, says ARM’s unique business model makes it more collaborative than most. “That’s one of the reasons why I’ve been here for 10 years.”