Navigation haute|Navigation gauche|Contenu

The emerging applications that will shape tomorrow’s enterprise network

topics
what's new
Green IT
Network
IPv6
network technologies
network security
future of enterprise network
Satellite Broadband
In the modern enterprise the network is central to countless critical business processes. Think of how a single centralized SAP platform may be controlling manufacturing processes and schedules on six continents simultaneously, or how many companies have abandoned or scaled back their offices in favor of mobile working. Ultimately, the network is the enabler of new ways of working.
 
Gazing forward three or four years, the network will become even more central to how organizations work. The network will no longer be a discrete domain for sharing files between multiple sites or consolidating communications applications like voice-over-IP and email. The future enterprise network will be a digital ocean teaming with life from bandwidth-intensive video communications to the chatter of millions of tiny devices reporting their status. Its ubiquity has sparked what analyst the Yankee Group calls the tipping point for the Anywhere Network. In this article, we look at five emerging enterprise applications that will have the biggest impact on the network.
 
 
  • Telepresence
 
Telepresence, the big brother to videoconferencing, is already making waves. Cisco, one of the most avid proponents of the life-like conferencing technology, gained $240 million in net benefit in using telepresence between October 2006 and January 2008. The 161 meeting rooms helped executives to be more productive (net benefit: $42 million), increase sales cycle time (net benefit: $68 million), and sales success rates have increased by being able to demonstrate the technology ($127 million), and $21 million in cost avoidance.
 
In today’s harsh business climate, it seems that appeal of telepresence is likely to increase. Rising travel and energy costs and the need to reduce carbon emissions and make decisions more quickly will create the business drivers to ensure take-up remains healthy.
 
Two factors could drive telepresence to mass-market status: the emergence of inter-company telepresence and mid-level systems.
 
Current telepresence systems are typically closed meaning that they only function between a company’s own sites. But in 2009, inter-company telepresence will become common, meaning that executives will be able to meet their customers and suppliers face to face without traveling. This will inevitably help the business case for deploying high-end telepresence rooms. The technology to link telepresence environments will be offered with a managed services framework.
 
The second trend driving growth will be mid-level telepresence systems. As more people experience the larger three screen / six person conference rooms, it will be easier to build a business case for less expensive, smaller one screen / two person telepresence systems to be deployed on remote sites or at executives’ homes.
 
Much has been said about the high cost of initial telepresence meeting rooms. Less is mentioned about the increase in bandwidth required. Each high-end system requires 20 Mbps dedicated, prioritized bandwidth per site, less for mid-level systems. Traffic will be carried over an IP-VPN but will need to be placed with a Platinum class of service as it is extremely sensitive to delay and packet loss.
 
Cisco’s Visual Networking Index report, which forecasts global bandwidth demands, estimated that telepresence will be a significant driver of enterprise IP network traffic. According to Cisco, in 2012 the amount of telepresence traffic on enterprise WANs will be more than five times the volume of the entire US internet backbone in 2000.
 
  • Video broadcasting and e-learning
 
Telepresence will not be the only video application to pulse through the corporate network. More and more IP-based video will be used in marketing and training: it will be common for all product literature to have some video element, and video-based webinars and training will ensure people are more trained and less traveled. If you can’t attend a conference, the proceedings will be screened on your desktop with the speaker and their presentation visible in real time or you can access a recorded playback. Alternatively, company results will be broadcasts as a video throughout organizations. IP video surveillance is also tipped to be a major growth area.
 
Evidence of the boom in video traffic is evidence in the annual Cisco Visual Networking Index. It estimates that YouTube traffic exceeds 100,000 terabytes per month, and that by 2012, video traffic will account for 90% of all IP traffic. Many organizations have their own YouTube channel and use it as a marketing too; in addition, YouTube viewing is a lunchtime activity for many employees.
 
To cope with the increased use of video broadcasting, companies should first look at WAN optimization. Not only can this help ensure mission-critical traffic is optimized, it can also block or throttle back traffic for applications or sites deemed as non-work related.
 
In addition, companies will be look to IP Multicasting. This innovative technology is a way to deliver the same video broadcast to multiple users without having to send it individually, ensuring the network capacity is efficiently utilized. This ensures that a video-broadcast of annual financial results does not swamp the corporate network or overload servers. The larger the information stream and the more users who want to receive it, the greater benefit from multicasting.
 
  • Video-enriched collaboration
 
It's likely that video will also become a key feature of collaborative environments. Yankee Group describes video as the killer application for unified communications.
 
Video chat, as part of an instant messaging system, will be simple to initiate and participate in. As more and more staff experience telepresence systems at work as well as video chat within their Web 2.0 consumer applications such as Google Mail, they will overcome the cultural barriers of “talking heads” and be more accustomed to quick video chats with colleagues in other offices. This will be common for distributed teams.
 
Two factors will drive further growth of video communications. Firstly, unified communications environments will also become inter-company, allowing colleagues to interact in a more immersive way than they can with email and phone calls.  Users will become accustomed to letting close customers or supplier see their presence status and participating in quick video chat sessions. A second development is embedding voice and video communications tools within business applications such as a supply chain system.
 
The Yankee Group believes that by 2015, Internet video communications will boom, driven in part by the vast networks of virtual friends on social networking sites who want to do more than Twitter into the ether. More companies will utilize social media internally and externally. Check out the Orange Business Services channel at http://orange-business.tv/.
 
Video chat may not require the bandwidth of a full-blown telepresence session, but it will require the same qualities of service required by IP telephony. This will mean that it is prioritized as high/Platinum on the network. Network optimization will ensure that users at remote sites can get a good experience despite bandwidth limitations.
 
For intercompany collaboration featuring video chat to be a compelling experience, corporate networks may need to be adjoined. This will be facilitated through IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), which integrates a specific resource control module that will allow the quality of service to be preserved throughout the different service providers’ networks.
 
  • Smart objects
 
All manner of devices will begin to chatter: door entry systems, photocopiers, vending machines, thermostats, valves, vehicle tracking systems, clothing tags and so on. Already machine-to-machine (M2M) and radio frequency identification (RFID) are rapidly maturing technologies and these applications will proliferate. Strategy Analytics predicts that the mobile M2M market will be worth $57 billion by 2014, encompassing 450 million modules.
 
What is driving this growth? The falling costs of sensors, actuators and modems. Once equipped, these objects will report on their status, connect with business rules and in some cases, make changes to themselves or their environment. The chatter of all these smart objects will be a few packets each, individually consuming very little bandwidth, but collectively they will require considerable extra capacity. Also to support this massive growth in Internet connected devices, networks will have to migrate to IPv6 has outlined in this article.
 
  • Cloud computing
The application that will have the biggest impact on the network is the nascent cloud computing concept. IDC expects cloud computing to be a $42 billion industry by 2012, 9% of the global IT market.
 
Cloud computing has many interpretations. Software as a service (SaaS) is the most common. Another is the use of grid computing like Amazon Web Services for times when companies need a temporary extra boost in processing power. Amazon offers its vast array of distributed, large-scale cluster computing and server virtualization software for low-cost number crunching. In it truest form, cloud computing involves a thin client – be it a desktop computer or a smart phone – accessing all its computing resources on the Internet: applications, storage, processing power, back-up.
 
Companies looking to cloud computing will probably use an information services provider. Like a digital TV services provider, they will be chosen based on their package of services they manage or aggregate: applications, storage, processing, remote-access, back-up and so on. The information services provider may manage all or only some of the services directly. They will provide the customer with a service level agreement across the various services.
 
The attraction of cloud computing will be accelerated by the financial crisis. With less finance available to replace hardware and new license fees, some companies will be tempted to sweat their assets while others will look to SaaS to deliver a wide range of up-to-date applications for a predictable on-going cost. Cloud computing will give companies more flexibility in provisioning for their workforce. For a business that is rapidly growing or contracting cloud computing offers genuine pay-as-you-grow computing. With license fees for processing, storage and applications charged on a per user basis, companies will not have to pay for what they don't use.
 
Cloud computing will have a major impact on the network, principally in how much bandwidth it requires. For a totally virtualized desktop – where all applications and storage and processing are remote – all data to and from the mouse, keyboard and screen must traverse the corporate network and the Internet. Users may need up to 1Mbps dedicated bandwidth per desktop to guarantee a good experience. The consequence is that organizations with many thousands of cloud computing users will need to increase desktop and backbone capacity significantly. Communications to and from the cloud computing provider may also need to be prioritized and accelerated for locations where bandwidth constraints threaten performance.

Looking forward

In conclusion, to cope with these five emerging applications, the future network will need to grow considerably, more bandwidth will be needed in the access layer as well as in the backbone and network optimization will also help make applications more efficient over the network. And to facilitate closer working relationships with business partners, customers and consumers, enterprise networks will see their traditional perimeters eroded by the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS).

IMS is a new control layer for telco networks. First developed by the mobile community, it has since been adopted by the IETF. It will be common across all networks – mobile, fixed, enterprise and the Internet allowing services on one network to interconnect seamlessly with services on another. Thanks to the IMS, users of one network domain will be able to securely access resources or services on another network domain and have their communications prioritized.