The Year Of Integration, Vendors unite?
January 12, 1999
INTERNETWEEK:
The new year is always greeted with the
same question: What's coming down the
pipe?
This year, it's not only what's coming down,
but how the size of that pipe will grow, how
users will connect to it, and how it will be
partitioned to handle the convergence of
voice, video, data and a host of new
integrated applications.
From the explosion of bandwidth, to access
services, to convergence, the issues and
trends IT managers should monitor include
quality of service, policy networking, IP/ATM
integration, voice-over-IP interoperability,
application-based Web-to-host solutions,
virtual private networking services, digital
subscriber line deployment, competitive local
exchange carriers and cable modems.
In the enterprise, the battle between Gigabit
Ethernet and ATM switches will be prominent
and IT managers will be presented with
price/performance issues that will be hard to
ignore.
Although Ethernet can't yet offer the kinds
of traffic controls that ATM touts, dropping
port pricing on Gigabit Ethernet will help
make it more attractive. By 2002, Layer 3
Gigabit Ethernet ports are expected to be as
much as $500 cheaper than ATM LAN ports,
according to Cahners In-Stat Group.
This year should see pricing parity, and that
is a big win for Gigabit Ethernet, whose offer
of big bandwidth should satisfy IT managers'
needs until quality-of-service (QoS)
standards begin maturing by year's end.
"I believe Gigabit will have more appeal in the
long run simply because it is Ethernet," said
Jared Huizenga, market research analyst at
Sage Research Inc.
While those two technologies increase in
importance, two others are likely to plummet
out of sight. "Token ring switches will all but
vanish from the LAN switch market in 1999.
The same can be said of 10-Mbps Ethernet,"
according to Huizenga.
IT managers seem to back that up. "We will
phase out 10-Mbps Ethernet in 1999. As we
add machines, we give them 100-Mbps
availability. I don't want to ever buy another
10-Mbps card," said Gary Cosmer, director of
information systems at TRM Copy Centers.
Commodity pricing on Fast Ethernet ports
also will drive the spike into token ring's
heart.
Policy networking may finally get its due this
year after Cisco, Lucent Technologies, Nortel
Networks and others lined up behind Novell's
NDS late last year.
But look for Microsoft and its Active
Directory to throw a wrench into
deployments if it hits the market late in the
year.
QoS issues may sail the same choppy waters
as vendors and IT managers try to define
QoS' usefulness in the era of
mega-bandwidth. If the two can't agree,
QoS in the enterprise may be DOA in 1999.
Also on the LAN, Layer 3 switching is likely to
spread its wings in 1999. Although the
technology won't change much, adoption
should soar. "Layer 3 switching will enable us
to get wirespeed routing and maintain our
collapsed backbone and our IP addressing
structure. It removes the bottleneck that
the router creates," said Chuck Yoke,
network architect at Janus.
Layer 4 switching will finally land in hardware
with Alteon Networks Inc. being the first to
unveil an ASIC, and that should make server
farms faster and smarter.
Convergence will be everywhere as IP
continues to dominate. The interoperability
of voice-over-IP products will be a top-level
enterprise issue. To that end, a group of
vendors last month said they would support
the iNOW interoperability standard backed by
ITXC Corp., Lucent and VocalTec
Communications Ltd.
"Our intent is simple," said Lov Kher, Lucent's
general manager for Internet telephony
solutions. "We want our products as
interoperable as they can be. Unless
something is done, calls won't be able to be
made among different service providers that
use different gateways."
Vendors also will have to answer quality
issues in order to win over skeptical IT
managers. According to Cahners In-Stat,
only 9 percent of voice traffic will be
IP-based in the enterprise in 1999, up from 6
percent last year.
In the Web-to-host applications space, Y2K
will be a major distraction for IT managers.
"Y2K will be the prevailing theme this year,
but IT managers will move toward more
application-based solutions for
Web-to-host," said Anura Guruge, an
independent SNA analyst. "The long-range
deployment of Web-to-host will be geared to
customized, application-specific solutions."
For the WAN, access and services will be hot
topics for IT managers in 1999.
"Laser pricing is coming down and DWDM
[dense wave division multiplexing] will be
cheap enough to bring to the customer
premises," said Lisa Allocca, an analyst with
Renaissance Worldwide Inc. She said the real
question is whether DWDM access will be
priced the same as T3 or ATM.
This year likely will be a make-or-break
period for economical, high-speed remote
access. The growth of telecommuting and
the increased use of intranet applications are
driving demand, but whether IT managers will
have the tools to meet the demand is the
question.
Digital subscriber line (DSL) services offer an
economical alternative to T1 lines, but DSL
has not lived up to its hype yet. While DSL
deployments are under way by all the
regional Bells and GTE, few users can
actually get the service today.
IT managers should start to see DSL benefits
with the collaboration between service
providers and computer heavyweights such
as Compaq, Gateway 2000 Inc., Intel and
Microsoft. IT managers will be able to buy
DSL-enabled PCs that essentially have
high-speed Internet access out of the box.
However, IT managers looking for high-speed
alternatives for their telecommuters will get
some help from a handful of competitive local
exchange carriers (CLECs) such as Covad
Communications Co., NorthPoint
Communications Inc. and Rhythms
NetConnections Inc., that specialize in DSL.
CLECs like these are aggressively deploying
DSL services in major cities across the
country and partnering with major service
providers.
At the same time, IT managers may find
another high-bandwidth route for
telecommuters. Specifically, 1999 will see
cable-modem-based high-speed services
gaining respectability as a business-user
data service.
However, even with these developments, IT
managers planning a telecommuter strategy
this year will find no simple solution. While
DSL will become available in more locations,
managers will feel as if they are reliving the
ISDN fiasco of the past 20-plus years.
Specifically, IT managers eager to use DSL
will spend a lot of time just determining if
service is available. Making matters worse,
even when a central office is equipped to
offer DSL, line conditions and a user's
distance from the central office will
determine who gets service.
Of course, even if appropriate DSL and cable
modem services become widely available,
they are really nothing more than a
high-speed pipe to a provider's network.
Making such a connection useful for a
business user means providing a secure path
back to the corporate network.
This is a role that virtual private networks
can fill. And this year will see many
business-oriented service providers offering
managed VPN services that ride over these
high-speed links. "This is the year VPN
matures and we start to see real growth,"
said Renaissance Worldwide's Allocca.
Chuck Moozakis and Salvatore Salamone
contributed to this story.
Copyright (c) 1999 CMP Media Inc.
By John Fontana
<<INTERNETWEEK -- 01-11-99, p. PG23>>
[Copyright 1999, CMP Publications] |
