Third is the growth of consumerization and consumer technology and their effect on the enterprise. Look at instant messagingit was a consumer technology that came in through the back door, and now CIOs and business managers are saying, "What do we do with this?"
Finally, people are looking for ways to make their companies more competitive. They're not focused just on cost savings. They're asking, how can we bring people together so they can become more innovative, creative, and competitive?
Q: What are the secondary issues?
A: CIOs are looking for a way to change their position within the company and how their position is viewed. If IT wants to be viewed as driving the business, collaborating is a good way of doing it. Also, the vendors are looking for new revenue streams. They want to augment the revenues of what they already have, and they can use collaboration to create an additional horizontal market. Microsoft is augmenting its strengths in Office by adding collaboration; IBM is doing the same thing with Notes, Domino, and SameTime; and Oracle is looking at how it can extend its database and applications revenues.
Q: I've always thought that there is no "next big thing," other than getting all the pieces of the "last big thing" to work together. Are we still in the Model T stage of connectivity?
A: I'd say we're only a little bit further along than that, but not only because the vendors don't have products that work together. It's also because of our own behavior. When you look at future workers, the average 18-year-old doesn't remember the world before the Internet. They text-message each other like mad. When those future workers start to come into the workforce, their behaviors and expectations will be different from ours. They use multiuser gaming technology like mad. When they play, they go into a virtual space. Why can't that technology be used to create a virtual workspace?
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.
