A little more than a year ago, Cabletron Systems, Lucent Technologies and 3Com Corp. revealed plans to make sweeping changes to their business models. But plans are sometimes just that, and not much has panned out thus far. 3Com shot itself in the foot, shattering customer confidence when it abandoned its high-end switching line. That fiasco, combined with the struggles of 3Com's management team to define the company's new direction, has resulted in a slide in 3Com's performance. The sounds of turmoil and restructuring have been heard about the closed doors at Lucent, too. The Lucent-Avaya-Agere trio is moving more slowly than cold molasses, and Avaya has had little success penetrating the North American networking market. But there is good news: Cabletron's reorganization has formed a strong new company, Enterasys Networks, that has even achieved profitability on paper.
Vendors have homed in on several trends they predict will drive their businesses forward, including convergence, high-availability hardware, the service-provider market and end-to-end solutions. These trends are directly related to the enterprise customer or have tangible technology benefits in enterprise products. In either case, it's good news for customers.
Convergence Ahead
At the top of this year's technological innovations are IP telephony and IP convergence. These solutions might not be as rock steady as your tried-and-true desktop phone, but it's quite clear the vendors selling you your data network are eyeing your telephone network. Yet IP convergence is about more than the phone on your desk: It's about delivering QoS (Quality of Service) to provide network resources for translating calls from one encoding form to another. It's also about furnishing an enterprise network that is as reliable as your existing phone system. And while it's not there yet, IP convergence is moving swiftly, with Alcatel, Cisco Systems and others delivering strong solutions.
By this time next year, we expect these solutions to have moved well beyond pilot stage. Vendors are quickly improving every aspect of the enterprise network, with upgrades popping up in a wide variety of equipment: from the core switches that deliver the backbone connectivity necessary to transport hundreds or thousands of calls across the enterprise network, to the edge switches that provide the packet classification and power delivery features necessary for a successful IP telephony deployment. Innovation is also the watchword when it comes to network equipment. For example, vendors are creating network-based codec resources capable of translating calls from one encoding scheme to another on the fly, without call-processor intervention or a VoIP gateway. Such developments will result in more reliable telephony solutions that are better integrated with the enterprise LAN.
Reigning Speeds
LAN technology has remained relatively stable in the past year. Gigabit Ethernet is still the dominant choice for high-speed interconnect in the data center, and switched 100-Mbps Ethernet connections are the de facto standard at the desktop. In 2000, we saw the debut of gigabit over copper, which is starting to gain momentum in the enterprise. Looking forward, we expect gigabit over copper to follow the same adoption curve 100-Mbps Ethernet traveled. Within three years, gigabit over copper will be a standard option for high-performance desktops; within five years, it will be the desktop medium of choice. This evolution will also drive the need for faster speeds in the core of the network -- namely, 10 Gigabit Ethernet.
Ten Gigabit Ethernet is the next step for a technology that was never expected to go beyond 10 Mbps. Although its ratification is more than a year away, vendors already are delivering 10 Gigabit Ethernet prototypes. Some customers with big bandwidth requirements -- primarily service providers and collocation providers seeking higher bandwidth connections for their high-demand networks -- have opted for early implementations. The enterprise, too, will need the additional bandwidth offered by the technology as networks grow and Gigabit Ethernet proliferates.
While interconnect technology has not undergone any radical changes recently, products are evolving to keep up with growing bandwidth demands in the enterprise. Avaya, Cisco, Enterasys, Extreme Networks, Foundry Networks and others are selling equipment that delivers up to 10 times the capacity of earlier product families. With these product evolutions, the enterprise can deploy higher-density products in the wiring closet and in the enterprise core without sacrificing performance.
Souped-Up Servers
While networks may be faster than servers today, that is about to change radically. In the past year, we saw vendors squeeze the last bit of performance out of Intel's now 10-year-old PCI bus. In the coming year, new architectures and improvements, such as PCI-X and InfiniBand, will boost the performance of servers and desktop workstations to new heights (see our InfiniBand Workshop). With these new architectures will come a fresh line of products to serve storage, networking and connectivity applications.
While the battle over directory services is in full swing, Microsoft has quietly won the war. Novell's NDS 8 and Netscape Communications Corp.'s Directory Server have been slowly sinking as enterprises adopt Windows 2000 and Active Directory. Nearly all vendors are leveraging Active Directory as part of their holistic approaches at managing enterprise security. Microsoft may not have the best directory product on the market, but it will succeed where others have failed simply because of the pervasive deployment of the Windows OS.
With IP convergence just around the corner, high availability has become a requirement. Service providers also are demanding more robust functionality and fault tolerance in the networking equipment they purchase. That demand for high quality trickles down from the service provider to the enterprise customer. In the past year, we have seen standards such as Rapid Spanning Tree, fault-tolerant link aggregation and standards-based virtual router redundancy protocols evolve. Similarly, hardware is emerging with fault-tolerant features, such as redundant switch fabrics and management processors. Hardware and firmware offerings such as nonstop code upgrades and distributed processing are enabling a more reliable generation of enterprise networking hardware.
Vendors have been preaching the end-to-end sermon for years. But in the past year, some have managed to back up their marketing with concrete implementations. Avaya, Cisco, Enterasys and Nortel are the top-tier vendors to watch this year. They're all big enough to weather the economic downturn, and they have the products necessary to truly claim an end-to-end solution. The name of the game is to sell business solutions instead of straight technology. Avaya, Cisco and Nortel all have strong trump cards to play as the convergence war heats up. And this year it will. These companies finally have the products to deliver an end-to-end solution, and they all desperately want to be your sole enterprise networking solutions provider.
Send your comments on this article to Joel Conover at conover@nwc.com.
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