Technology Viewpoint

regarding IP networks.

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at a glance.

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largely transparent to the customer and consumer but are fundamental to the success of the provider. Use the charts shown in the figures in this section to see how business drivers are driven through technology selection, product selection, and application deployment in order to provide solution delivery. Additionally, business drivers can be appended with critical success factors, and then driven through the technology, product, and application layers, coupled as necessary with partnering, to produce customer solutions with high service value.

Technology Viewpoint

Time, opportunity, and money remain the fundamental business requirements and primary drivers of IP networking technology. Today’s company networks are now strategic business assets that must be planned, leveraged, and, most of all, successful to deliver business value that is measurable in customer revenue and satisfaction.

Lack of data bandwidth drives the divergence of data. Divergence of data creates differences in technology, which are the fundamental enablers, carriers, and harborers of data. Lack of data bandwidth mandates a distributed approach to business computing. Multiple data formats beget multiple data networks. The scarcity of bandwidth justifies the need for packet data networking, in order to afford a distributed computing architecture. You can only diverge data so far, pushing the boundaries of diminishing returns, before you have to converge and reassimilate data and technology to derive further advantages. IP networking stitches data and technology back together.

Companies around the world are doing this with an open-system, IP framework. The Internet Protocols are equally suited for LAN (local) and WAN (long) communications, allowing companies to converge networks. That convergence has been one of the defining strengths of IP networking.

Over the last few years, significant changes have occurred that are impacting the industry and affecting the service provider value chain and business model. The changes in regulatory policy have enabled more competition and service substitutions, in an attempt to drive a regulated services industry toward a commodity services trade. This has impacted the competitive structure of providers who now find themselves transforming their business models deeper into customer-centric orientation. This is necessary since product differentiation is becoming less distinctive.

In a competitive environment, revenue generation remains paramount yet more difficult to close due to more discriminating customers with many available options. Flat-rate bandwidth offerings also remain, but value recognition must be marked beyond mere transport functionality. With customers placing value distinction in IP-based services, providers must find ways to incorporate IP value into their product wares.

It is this search for IP value that leads providers to a fundamental change in system architectures—architectures based on open standards rather than vertical, proprietary, purpose-built networks. An open-standards approach is a horizontal end-to-end model that yields a product-and-services methodology based on standard building blocks. Modular in nature, these IP-based products and services can be combined in different ways to create unique networks and services.

The cost and time savings, convergence options, and the innovation engine of IP networks cannot be ignored. IP is a system-level enabler, a core technology and foundation on which many other systems can be built. Designed from the ground up and implemented as a low- cost and extremely efficient communications vehicle, IP is now the most widespread network protocol suite in use in the world. Everyone can benefit from IP, and anyone can be beat by it.

Data, voice, video, and Internet data must come together. By standardizing various types of data—formerly associated with entirely separate technologies—IP provides a powerful solution. A converged IP network creates the foundation for greater collaboration, opening new ways to work and interact, simplifying network management, and reducing capital and operating costs for all. Converged networks are fueling the development of an array of dynamic applications such as e-learning, unified messaging, and integrated call-center and customer-support systems.

As service substitutions continue to proliferate, subscribers of IP services will increasingly distinguish value among different provider offerings. The ability to uniquely and rapidly intersect customer needs with service-oriented solutions is an essential competitive skill, best leveraged on the basic tenants of simplicity, reliability, and a clear value proposition.

Technology Brief—IP Networks 95

The networking convergence engine of the late 20th century was IP. IP is today’s dynamo of network convergence and service creation, extending productivity benefits, service variety, and innovation into the start of the 21st century. IP is unifying networks while facilitating the purposeful and appropriate combination of data.

The fundamental design of the Internet and the essential building blocks of the Internet Protocols provide scale. That is the intrinsic beauty of IP. Whether networks are local, long, mobile, or global IP scales.

Today, we seek to stay connected to the Internets, to maintain periodic touch as we move and revolve around a World Wide Web of knowledge and opportunity—pulsing on the backbones of IP networks. Indeed, IP networks are the beating hearts of our developing, digital consciousness.

IP has become the new ascendancy in communications, handling nearly any internetworking task you can throw at it. Globally and universally extensible, IP is in vast abundance. The only scarcity is what we can do with all of it.