What direction is networking taking? Throughout the 60s, 70s and 80s networking was dominated by IBM´s SNA and to a lesser degree the defunct Digital Equipment Corporation´s DECnet. These wide-area protocols were offered primarily to enterprises while the DoD was experimenting with TCP/IP as a means to provide communications during a cold war nuclear nightmare scenario. Within buildings, terminal servers gave way to LANs, which we started connecting via LAN bridges. These bridges were not structurally stable in scale so the industry offered up routers to segment and control data traffic. This departure from SNA toward TCP/IP was a structural change in the industry, which spawned present day networking. There is no alternative to TCP/IP, no discontinuity technology that promises to alter the status quo. Is the industry on a predictable trajectory of faster, better and cheaper? Or is there a new framework amassing that is rooted in the interaction between Moore´s Law and Metcalf´s Law?

It used to be that the IT industry was segmented around the OSI model. Service providers offered layer 1 connectivity while networking players offered layers 1-3. Software and computing companies were at layer 7. I never really could figure out layers 4 though 6 and neither did the industry as there are no companies that focus in these layers. One result of the computing and networking laws interacting is that the OSI model no longer segments the industry.

Computing, software, telecommunications and networking are coming together in ways that no one would have predicted. Moore´s Law predicts the doubling of computer power while its cost is halved every eighteen months, which has been amazingly accurate for decades. Metcalf´s Law talks about the increasing value of a network as the number of end-points connected increases. More powerful end-points and servers are being connected into bigger and bigger networks, which enable new possibilities and innovation.

If the web browser was the launch point of the commercial internet, then we are eleven years into its evolution. The first phase of this evolution was and still is primarily an efficiency change agent. Business planners and entrepreneurs looked at businesses and their process and extracted cost and delay both human and system thanks to the internet. This efficiency agent led to the boom and bust of 2001 and the more rational times of the past five years. The second phase of internet evolution has more to do with changing and re-structuring industries than individual business as Moore´s and Metcalf´s laws expand.

There is a bi-directional flow of ideas and technology between computing/software, telecommunications and networking which promises to be disruptive. This is being played out now on multiple levels and is evident everywhere. In the consumer space, there are huge acquisitions of companies in different OSI segments. Two of the most impressive are e-Bay´s purchase of skype for $2.6 billion adding communications value to its e-commerce exchange. Another big acquisition was Google who seized the opportunity to sell ads in the new on-demand video model of YouTube for $1.65 billion. e-Bay and Google are layer 7 companies purchasing what were traditionally layer 1 services, that is communications and video delivery for huge dollars. While high visibility and valued acquisitions will continue in the consumer market space, in the enterprise market there will be multiple manifestations of this structural change in the IT and telecommunications industries.

The competitive and partnering combinations will only become more creative. For example, Microsoft and Cisco´s increasing competitive postures around unified communications and network security is a prime example of how layers 7 and 3 are going head to head. Microsoft´s new relationship with Nortel around unified communications marks a turning point in communications toward software and services. Avaya has stated that its strategic goal is to transform its company into a software and services concern. Cisco´s relationship with companies such as SAP point to a trend that networking is becoming a development platform offering up callable services. Cisco´s introduction of TelePresence is yet another example of a traditional layer 3 company offering a layer 7 service.

Sure there are plenty of industry initiatives such as replacing the $600 billion TDM telecommunications infrastructure with VoIP and TCP/IP. Data centers are being redesigned thanks to lower cost, high speed wide and local area bandwidth plus appliance consolidation. Callable services such as security, telephony, location, management, etc., are being embedded within network infrastructure. Communications are being embedded into applications. Network access is getting smarter thanks to access control, wireless technologies and their linking into policy managers and directory so IT services are offered to the right people at the right time in the right place. Branch office network devices are being offered via integrated platforms that deliver security, routing, wired and wireless connectivity, VPNs and IP telephony. Networks are playing a larger role in application delivery by increasing performance, security and monitoring. And on and on and on. All of these initiatives make for a healthy industry and they are building upon a TCP/IP foundation.

Because of all of the above, networking has moved well beyond a simple connectivity service. Networking is sounding and looking a lot like computing as service points and attributes blur. The following 7 trends prove the point.

Network Virtualization: Virtualization was first applied to data center design but it´s now a network architecture attribute. Virtualizing a network separates its physical and logical attributes providing flexibility to segment management in ways that fit an IT organization. One example of this is in the area of network appliances. As appliances become more horizontal in their functionality by integrating firewall, routing, IP telephony, VPN, etc., the groups responsible for their management will access configuration and management tools which the appliance will virtualize to their particular functions. Network resources will become increasingly virtual, that is the network will deliver its various services everywhere an end-point is plugged in, independent of physical location while management can be centralized, distributed or some combination of both.

Service Expansion and Device Consolidation: Networking was connectivity and the tweaking and segmenting of traffic through prioritization techniques such as Quality of Service (QoS) and virtual local area networks (VLANs). While managing connectivity through VLANs and QoS are important they represent an old model of networking. Services such as network admission control (NAC), IP telephony (VoIP), TelePresence etc., are the new services that are being embedded and ?¬¢‚Äö?ᬮ??¨callable?¬¢‚Äö?ᬮ¬¨?? within the network. At the same time that services are being expanded networking devices are being consolidated. Network equipment such as switches and routers has added features such as firewalls, WLAN, call managers, IPS/IDS, etc. With the pending boom in TelePresence services look for advanced QoS capabilities to be added to switches and routers. In short, more services will be added in the network but with fewer devices.

Unified Networking: Networking access is becoming unified for both end-points and server access. On the user side, wireless access, both WLAN and mobile/cellular, are the hot new areas of network access growth. Laptops have outpaced desktop computers in terms of shipments while smartphones and/or PDAs are being shipped annually in the millions. But network access is becoming unified and transparent to users even as the shift from fixed to mobile access continues. As the number of access points and media alternatives such as LAN, WLAN, GSM, WAN, etc., increase, end-points will simply connect in to a network and deliver appropriate services for that person and associated end-point. With networking becoming unified and access universal any end-point will be offered networking and its allowed applications.

In addition to end-point networking being unified so too is datacenter networking. Datacenter access is a hot area with huge advancements whether it’s through blade switches, top of rack or a centralized architecture. And there will be a lot of activity and innovations happening on this front as various datacenter-networking technologies become unified.

Non-stop Networking: Just like large computing systems and data centers, non-stop operation was a key design point. With all business process flowing over networks, the same non-stop availability attributes are being applied to networking. Maintenance windows, which include down time, will be a luxury of the past. Organizations can´t afford downtime and their networks can´t stop. Techniques and technologies such as auto-recovery, hard swap of hardware and software, redundant design, etc., will increasingly be a part of a networking environment.

Application Fluency: Networks used to be a conduit through which applications would flow. But many application developers still assume LAN type performance for their applications, ignoring WAN limitations and performance degradation. To increase application performance delivery, networks are becoming fluent in a wide variety of applications. Networks increasingly understand application flow, format and content to speed up throughput.

On-Demand Secure Access: Network access will surely become secure as the industry embraces access control. Network access is becoming ubiquitous and on-demand thanks to advances in wireless technologies and services.

Value Added Service Providers: The service providers are increasingly offering more managed services on a global scale. Service providers would provide layer 1 services such as private lines, frame relay and now MPLS. But they too have been moving up the stack by offering managed routers and firewalls. Over the next business cycle service providers will be offering hosted IP services and more sophisticated managed services especially focused on the branch office network area. Many will catch the new TelePresence wave as well and offer business-to-business TelePresence services.

Network virtualization, service expansion and device consolidation, unified networking, non-stop networking, application fluency, on-demand secure access and value added service providers are but a few of the advancements that are being made in networking. With all of this intelligence and functionality moving into the network fabric, one overarching shift will be that application developers will ?¬¢‚Äö?ᬮ??¨call?¬¢‚Äö?ᬮ¬¨?? network services while automating business process. Their tools will be the same, web services/SOA, but the physical location of the services in which they call will not be in a data center or department cluster, etc., but will also be in the network, increasing performance, flexibility and reliability. The network is the only horizontal IT resource available to IT executives and it´s taking on more and more computing attributes and IT projects. You can pick your term to describe the road ahead: intelligent network, smart network, next generation network, etc. I prefer to call it just computer networking.

So is the industry on a predictable trajectory or is there a new framework amassing that is rooted in the interaction between Moore´s Law and Metcalf´s Law? It´s a new framework that´s amassing with implications far greater than I have time to write about here. But stay tuned, we´ll write and podcast on the next computer networking industry here at the Lippis Report.

Posted 13 November 2006 at 3:31 pm under Lippis Report, Cisco, Enterprise Mobility. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.