"The critical point," Nethercott said, "is how to take those applications and converge them with voice."
Enterprises need to lay the groundwork today to build toward that vision. Allstate Insurance examined the possibility of building a converged IP network back in 2002, said Bruce Senneke, procurement officer responsible for buying voice and data transport for the insurance giant. Although the time wasn't right then, the company did rework and stagger all its network-oriented contracts to come due in 2007 to executive on a more coherent convergence strategy around IP, Senneke said.
A new generation of network-centric, service-oriented applications is emerging to ride on those networks. One of those apps may be Wikis, which create user-editable Web pages and have emerged as an important next-generation collaboration tool.
According to Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia (which now includes 800,000 articles in its English version, with popular pages being changed more than 100 times per minute), Wikis are heading into the enterprise. He pointed to Best Buy, which recently added Wiki capabilities to its corporate intranet to enable retail associates to communicate with one another.
"[Wikis] are really great for grass-roots communications. They cut out the hierarchy of the company," Wales said. At Best Buy, he said as an example, "about one out of 10 stores have a car stereo geek, the kind of person who can really provide spectacular customer service. A Wiki empowers that person to communicate with other associates directly. That kind of thing is very hard to do traditionally."
Subsea cable alternatives can provide a level of comfort for those concerned about disruptions. Realistically, they will continue to play a small, but critical role in the short term.
Maintaining existing network infrastructures often incurs huge technical debt before newer technologies are adopted over time.
Amid ongoing regional uncertainties, telecom infrastructure in the Middle East has expand to include terrestrial low-latency network infrastructure, which offers resilience and agility in navigating political complexities without relying solely on undersea networks.
