Vendor Vision

Some people call it convergence. 3Com Chief Technology Officer John Hart refers to it as the unified field theory of networking. Others talk about pervasive computing.

No matter which buzzword you prefer, it's clear that the major network vendors, fueled by technologies brewing in their research labs, are preparing to roll out products and services over the next decade that will dramatically transform the corporate network.

"People are thinking of this as a minor thing, an improvement over what we have now, which is the wrong way of looking at it," Hart says. "There's nothing minor about it - everything will change."

And driving those changes will be technological advances in areas such as fiber optics and wireless communications. Alastair Glass, head of photonics research at Lucent's Bell Labs, says that a single optical fiber today can carry 400G bit/sec. That capacity is doubling every year.

"In 10 years, we'll reach the theoretical limit of how much information photonics can carry - 1,000 terabits per second on a single fiber - which is mind-boggling," Glass says.

Lucent and other companies are also working on a new fiber topology that uses intelligent optical switching to provide full network meshing and packet switching over fiber. "The bandwidth will be there; how we'll use it is the biggest unknown,'' Glass says.

Even as fiber-optic wires deliver bandwidth to the network backbone, wireless technology will stretch the boundaries of corporate nets, making them increasingly "free-form, amorphous and liquid," says Steve Mann, vice president of product strategy for Computer Associates.

Breakthroughs in spread-spectrum technology are expected to push wireless into the mainstream. "You'll see wireless able to bring connectivity to every user across the planet at up to 1G bit/sec each, all at the same time, with no interference," says Marc Smith of Microsoft Research.

This will alter every concept of employee mobility and the virtual workplace. "The network ultimately comes down to a handheld device that combines telephony, data and multimedia functions," says Rob Zimmer, director of networking strategies at IBM's Network Hardware Division.

IBM and others are pushing to develop these permutations of notebook computers, personal digital assistants (PDA), cellular phones and pagers that can run business processes from wherever end users happen to be, Zimmer adds.

"The face of networking can become the face of any device I own - a TV, my clock radio, a handheld computer or the dashboard of my car," says Paul Doolan, vice president and CTO of Ennovate Networks.

Smith, the first sociologist hired by Micro-soft to explore the concept of social computing, adds, "With things like wearable computers, cyberspace will be around and between us all the time, and every object will have an information halo accessible by any device."

If this vision of employees scattered everywhere connecting to the network over new and strange devices seems at odds with the notion of a single, unified, converged network with everyone running IP, that's because it is.

In fact, technology visionaries at major network companies recognize this fundamental dichotomy and are addressing it.

"When you look at mobility and wireless [technology], there's nothing homogeneous about the market," says Denise Lahey, vice president of mobile and embedded products for Oracle. "You have information appliances - handheld computers and PDAs - all with different form factors and different browser interfaces. Trying to network them is not like trying to network 300 million PCs that all happen to use Windows."

Oracle is developing a middleware architecture that will allow pervasive wireless networking of these various devices and the applications that will be run on them. "You'll carry a handheld device that automatically synchronizes itself with applications on the corporate network," Lahey says. "When you're traveling on business and you enter a hotel or get off of a plane at the airport, [the device] will connect to wireless services that update your schedule and automatically make airline or hotel arrangements for the new meeting you have to attend tomorrow."

"You need a middleware infrastructure that can make all of the different networks and network services appear as one to the user," adds George Vanacek, chief scientist for the IP Technologies Organization at AT&T Labs. And that remains a work in progress. "We know how to go about it on any homogeneous system, but when you look at the scope of so many different technologies and services, we don't have anything in place."

What's likely to happen is that this middleware will wedge itself in between the hardware and the software of switches, routers and operating systems, says Marc Christensen, vice president of Intel's Network Communications Group.

End users will encounter a simple, network dial tone, the converged network equivalent of the telephone dial tone, with advanced features such as security, directory services and intelligent quality of service hiding in the background. "All you want the user to worry about is getting on and off of the network," Christensen says.

Convergence, in other words, will be an illusion. It's an external perspective from which users see any service they want in the network. "But to actually deliver those services, we'll explore the hell out of every resource we can," 3Com's Hart says.

IP will be a popular protocol but it won't be the only one, says Jeff Baeher, Sun's chief networking officer. "What you'll see instead is people leveraging all of the different technologies and transmission options. The main function of the network won't be routing; it'll be transcoding between all these devices and technologies.'' For example, when an end user is on a PalmPilot with a black and white screen, the network will know not to send a color JPEG, Baeher says.

For that kind of network intelligence, systems management has to rise to a whole new level. "We need to move away from counting packets to modeling trends before they occur," Baeher says.

Self-aware, self-healing networks of the future will rely on artificial intelligence. CA is the first software vendor to provide network management applications based on neural-network technology. Its "Neugents" are able to learn how a network behaves and can predict impending problems based on that behavior.

"We've got the prediction part of it down, but humans still have to engage in order to fix the problem," CA's Mann says. "In 10 years, we'll see neural-network applications that not only predict potential problems and provide diagnostics but can actually go ahead and implement procedures to heal the situation."

Pete Solvik, chief information officer at Cisco, adds, "Instead of provisioning dumb pipes and then digging into bits and bytes when the system doesn't work, network managers will work with a whole new set of tools at the network services layer.''

And for network executives who might feel overwhelmed by all these changes, outsourcing will become an increasingly attractive and viable option.

Zimmer says that traditional and nontraditional carriers, realizing that profit margins on simple bandwidth services will be thin, are evolving into what he calls application service providers.

"These are organizations that don't necessarily have to own network infrastructure," Zimmer says. "Their focus is on enabling business processes on any network."

He predicts that corporations will begin down the outsourcing path with standard applications such as e-mail or off-the-shelf human resources packages, then business users will ultimately outsource day-to-day applications to whomever can do it for less.

"Web-site hosting is already a $3 billion market, and over the next two or three years the same economic drivers will move every fundamental business process onto the Web," Zimmer says.

Ennovate's Doolan takes this vision of outsourced network services even further: "You'll have a marketplace of full-service communications, content and data-management players who'll outsource everything for you. You'll work through an interface that talks to you and moves around on your screen - think of the baby on the show 'Ally McBeal' with a Cray for a brain and gigabits of I/O."

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Csenger is a freelance writer living in Hawaii. He can be reached at mcsenger@gte.net.