Network of the future may not be a pipedream

18.04.2005
Von Nicolas Callegari

Duxbury Networking last week held a technology update session, where the company revealed that the network of the future may be more accessible now than businesses may think.

Louis Helmbold, newly-appointed technology and business development manager at Duxbury Networking, says that the channel needs to start designing networks with the future in mind, given that convergence and consolidation have a large influence on how a network will have to operate.

The need to consolidate and converge services onto a single, multi-service network, comes as a result of a number of separate, yet equally important networks, which all need their own dedicated resources and staff to run.

This, according to Andy Robb, technology specialist at Duxbury Networking, unnecessarily increases the complexity of managing a company?s ICT infrastructure because these systems often require a different set of skills (for example, telephone, security and IT networks), which tends to drive up costs.

While consolidation in the data center has been proven to save money and improve operational efficiency, the network seems to be the next logical place to cut ICT costs, especially with IP being the driving technology behind major developments, such as VoIP, video conferencing, instant messaging and the like.

However, to be able to guarantee quality of service (QoS), bandwidth is a major requirement, which, SA businesses hope, will come down in price pending competition in the market, if and when that happens.

Being able to deliver multiple services on a single network does have a number of advantages, especially with regard to mobility.

Helmbold refers to a Gartner report, which recently revealed that a mobile employee, with the appropriate access to a corporate network via wired or wireless infrastructure, can gain up to three hours a week in productivity.

The challenge here, he says, is not the infrastructure, but rather setting user requirements and delivering services via policies. "The adaptable network will follow the user, no matter the location or access device," he adds.

Users will often find that their existing infrastructures will cater for their needs, and that a little bit of intelligence on the network will help them realize true multi-service network computing.

Accepting the multi-service network of the future may also be a bit of a cultural shift. Given the chronic problem in SA of tight legislation, which has put the country way behind the rest of the world when it comes to technologies such as wireless and VoIP, businesses would need to redesign processes to breed a culture of using these technologies to their full advantage, if they hope to realize any savings, whether in productivity or in cost.

However, companies are starting to see these advantages, as was found by recent IDC worldwide research, which indicated that mobile computer sales are up on desktops, even in the African region, owing to the price/performance balance being reached by most of the major manufacturers.