TechTrends For Planners According to an article by Paul Desmond of Network World, there are several significant communication developments that will impact long range marketing planning in
the ensuing years. He considers some of these to be the bandwidth boom; wireless; outsourcing; and computer power.
Demand for dedicated bandwidth will increase at a compound annual growth rate
of 32% from 1998 through next year, according to consultancy Vertical Systems Group.
The bandwidth boom shows no sign of abating. Companies have announced the building of an all-IP
transatlantic cable that would boost capacity by more than one-third vs. current cables and new amplifier technology to double the capacity of existing fiber. At the same time, satellites slated to
be operational within the next three years will be capable of downloading traffic at 100M bit/sec, with uplinks of 2M bit/sec.
Shipments of wireless Internet access devices, after experiencing
double- and triple-digit growth through 2004, will eventually replace the PC as the preferred Internet access method, according to market researchers Cahners In-Stat Group. And, researchers recently
claim they determined how to squeeze three wireless channels out of a frequency that previously supported only one. That would triple the capacity of wireless links while improving quality.
"In
15 years we will see the difference between wired and wireline disappear entirely as wireless connections become more broadband and more reliable," says James Kobielus, an analyst with The Burton
Group and a Network World columnist.
As a way of dealing with the complexity inherent in providing solid security, and of running networks in general, companies will continue to outsource. The
movement toward outsourcing is "a very natural evolution," says William Pulleyblank, director, exploratory server systems with IBM Research. He says. "Companies now want to focus on their core
competence.
And, E-commerce is an outsourcing driver, says Andrew Efstathiou, program manager at The Yankee Group. "In a Web environment, as people are accessing enterprise systems from outside,
the cost of being down is very large," he says. "Having 100% availability and rapid recoverability is difficult to achieve, so firms are outsourcing to address that issue."
Whether you outsource
or not, demand for computing power will continue to rise. IBM Research is at work on a cellular computing architecture that uses silicon with memory and processing power resident on the same chip.
Data that it takes to solve a problem is distributed among the chips. Each chip processes its part of the data, analyzes it and shares results with other processors, but only as necessary. "There is
no notion that any central part will ever look at all the data," Pulleyblank, of IBM, says. That means that applications can be much more efficient. He goes on to say that "If data gets larger and a
million processors isn't enough, and we need two million, we can effectively extend it up to that level," he says.
Find out more
here.