A combination of an announcement by DT and a Pew survey is showing us what the next-gen Internet may look like, and why. The demand for flexible services, created by rewired, iPhoned, social brains, combines with cloud and optical technology to create something totally new!
I think we're on the same page, Kim. We're moving from an age where IT and information was 'strategic" because it was long-cycle in planning and execution or even procurement. We're now moving to one where it's tactical, on-demand-on-a-whim. That has profound implications on everything in the food chain!
An exciting vision, Tom, and I agree with your forecast. The Internet of the future will not only be service-oriented, but (I think) will emphasize "a la carte" aggregation of services, be increasingly virtualized, and be platform/device agnostic (it would like to be OS-agnostoic, but there are obstacles to that).
Just as an aside, this servers to underline that any digital services based on exchange of small dry goods (disks, for example) will become extinct.
I'd actually resist giving it any specific name that suggested what I'd call an affirmative evolution was in play. We're evolving, not being directed. There is no model, no specific firm driving things, and no "ahead" or "behind" because this is simply the result of a natural set of forces acting on a market. Companies go where the money is, for example.
You do raise an interesting question with ahead-ness and behind-ness, which is whether the move will be influenced more on the network side or on the cloud side. My view is that OpenFlow is one example of the migration, and that stuff from the cloud DevOps area like Melange is another. Both are needed, either can create a context for the other, so who will win and lose? The fastest and the slowest, respectively!
Thanks. So how do you see internet firms positioning themselves for this new internet model? You stated that this curent model has ben evolving in this direction for a decade now, who are the principal players for this new model and do you have any firm(s) that you think may be out of sync with the current trend? So rather than calling it I2, is it right to call it Internet 2.0 and how does it differ from Web 2.0?
OpenFlow is a pretty arcane topic, Bolingbroke, and that's just the basics! You're right in that what it does is to permit direct application control of network connectivity and also allows users to create explicit "failure modes" to create an orderly transition to a different network state if something major breaks. What you lose is "permissive connectivity" of the kind that Ethernet and IP provide, which might be an important loss in a big network. For the Internet, the critical thing about OpenFlow is that it's a superb intra-cloud strategy, meaning a way to support internal flows of video and information. To address the cloud you'd still probably want a layer of IP connectivity. There are gateway strategies being devised here; take a look at Melange ( http://wiki.openstack.org/Melange) if you're interested in seeing how that might work. The trick is going to be to link the addressing of cloud services to OpenFlow switching. There's some stuff that will be announced shortly that may contribute there!
Tom, you mentioned OpenFlow, which I knew very little about. I went out to the Web and did some reading and come back from that a very humbled person. One thing that I think I was able to understand is that it makes the networking enviroment a great deal more resilent enabling appplications to call the shots in regard to network layouts rather than the other way around. So presumably if a network experienced a failure alternatives would be waiting to take over.
First, the current Internet model has actually been evolving in this direction for at least a decade. CDNs in particular have created a mechanism for short-stopping traffic before it really ever hits the core. As video grows as an the dominant traffic type, it makes CDN-served content even more significant in terms of total traffic. The mobile and app craze generates a new model where instead of visiting a website the user accesses "the cloud", and that means that we create a kind of service core from which we distribute information, instead of distributing information end-to-end.
Second, I don't think that I2 is really heading in the same direction as the market overall. From what I noted above, you see that my view is that the Internet is moving toward being a kind of virtual cloud-and-CDN combination with access connections. I2 is still about end-to-end connectivity.
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
Subsidized handsets, rather than locked handsets, should be the focus of regulators. We're not getting good deals, not fostering innovation, and weakening our power as buyers.
50 billion household devices will be on the Internet by 2020, according to Cisco. And we're hearing foreign governments are hacking our infrastructure. Surely our refrigerators are next!
YouTube's move to a partial pay-for-view model could help relieve a dearth of good new content but it could also complicate debates in many parts of the world over payment by content providers for delivery of their material to customers.
That's what Larry Page said on Google's earnings call, referring to the conjunction of mobile and the cloud. Well, let's chart it then! We need to be thinking about an Internet where 90% of our traffic goes to 70 destinations within 40 miles of us.
Facebook's Graph Search may face some profound challenges and risks, first, because Facebook users haven't been thinking of their posts as product reviews; and second, because Facebook will now have to contend with the social-network equivalent of SEO "gaming" of results.
EU operators are considering joining up to create a pan-European network to reduce competitive overbuild and cost. This might lower costs and focus operators on higher-level, more interesting services.
Microsoft's buy of Skype could revitalize Phone 7, give Microsoft a social, gaming, and collaborative strategy, and spell the end for old-fashioned telco voice. It will also certainly give Google a headache in its Voice, Chat, and even Android strategy!
Subsidized handsets, rather than locked handsets, should be the focus of regulators. We're not getting good deals, not fostering innovation, and weakening our power as buyers.
New tools like laptops, tablets, smartphone, and wireless connectivity let us work from San Diego to Katmandu, and anywhere in between. But time management remains a problem.
A survey by JD Powers found that customer interest in product features is lessening as phones evolve. Rather than features, price is driving purchases, and that change could have a dramatic impact on how IT departments secure these devices.
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