Originally appeared in MSI Magazine
July 1, 1999

Begging for Bandwidth


It’s easy to get jaded when, after your three-year ERP systems rollout, your solution vendor rolls out E-Commerce or the webtop as The Next Big Thing. Your company is challenged to place more of its business processes on line because customer expectations have been raised by the successes of the FedEx tracking sites of the world—or because your chief executive just attended another talk that began with the fighting words “Amazon.com.”

However, for most enterprise IT groups, the biggest change this year might not necessarily be the Internet or the webtop. Maybe some are busy filling in gaps in their enterprise systems, appending supply chain or customer relationship management to their ERP systems. But that’s just a continuation of the same reengineering that your organization has probably been mired in for the past five years.

Today, the major change is that Y2K concerns are forcing many organizations into temporary hiatus in their bold reengineering plans. Don’t grow too complacent however, because the next cycle of change might make some aspects of ERP migration appear trivial by comparison—and we’re not talking about EAI either.

Instead, the next big transition will occur at a far more basic level—the way in which organizations literally communicate. Several converging technology trends promise to make Sun’s pioneering vision, “The Network is the Computer” a rather tame prediction.

That trend is not network computing per se. Yes, there will be network appliances—not the emasculated PCs that were being pushed a year ago, but things like smart printers, wireless Internet palmtops, smart phones, or multimedia computers. Instead, the real change is to the networked application.

The networked application will be much different from your conventional application. For instance, imagine logging onto a self-service website to get technical assistance. You fill out some forms, and for a difficult question, you talk into your computer, and a real, live person answers you. Multimedia help desks that accept voice over IP are available today.

However, what's more important is that this may actually steal some of the thunder from another recent web innovation: the idea of logging directly into your business partner's database to get information. The voice-enhanced customer service application provides a more elegant and simple approach: why not click the mouse and talk directly to the dispatcher who could tell where your shipment really is? It could avoid some pretty expensive upgrades to the transaction system.

Admittedly, the technology for transmitting voice over IP is immature. A recent Lucent demonstration of an IP-based PBX system still carried plenty of echo and distortion. To some extent, that problem will eventually get solved. The real issue will be who shapes the vision for the next-generation, networked application.

It comes down to a battle of pipelines, and who controls them. Traditionally, every desktop had two: a phone cable and a data jack. Developments to converge voice, multimedia, and data offer the tempting possibility of shrinking that to a single jack. The question is, who will control the connection: telecom or IT?

Both IT and telecom groups enter the fray with plenty of baggage. The telecom folks have history on their side, because they’ve been in the utility business for generations; the best that any IT group could boast is perhaps a decade or two. The telecom folks view service as a utility: pick up the phone and there's a dial tone. When was the last time you could say that about your local area network?

Yet, the telecom folks are approaching the new age of bandwidth convergence with a 19th century technology that is fast becoming a luxury in a bandwidth-hungry age: the switched circuit, which dedicates an entire connection to one conversation, regardless of whether it is active or not. The IT folks have a nice answer: IP networks that slice up messages, not pipes, promising much more cost-efficient use of bandwidth.

There are also conflicting views of how network applications are to be delivered: as a basic service, which the telecom folks are expert at, or as value-added functionality, which the IT folks do well, at least when they get their APIs right. It sets up some interesting philosophical battles: Whether the enterprise is served better with an emphasis on service or leading-edge functionality. The victor will be the organization that can somehow reconcile both contradictory visions.