The Next Chapter: Wide-Area Networks

Computerworld - CLOUDS AHEAD
Private wide-area networks are dead; long live the public cloud. With the advent of inexpensive, secure, easy-to-manage public connections that reach the entire range of available IT devices, businesses will run, not walk, to put their WANs over the public cloud.
-- Sheldon Laude, chairman, CenterBeam Inc., Santa Clara, Calif.

ONLY A FEW SURVIVE
After the dust settles in three to five years, I see three to four megacarriers surviving in each local market in the U.S. These megacarriers will offer progressive pricing based on packet usage, flat rates or simplified bundles. They'll each offer long distance, local service, cable, broadband Internet access and wireless in each market, as well as new enhanced services.
-- Mike Scheele, managing partner, Telecom Asset Management Group, San Francisco

DATA INTEGRATION NETWORKS
Ubiquitous gigabit bandwidth within buildings and campuses will make "logically distributed databases" feasible in the next two to three years for early adopters. At gigabit speeds, networks start to look like disk I/O channels. This means that much finer-grained data operations can occur over loosely coupled data components instead of a huge central database. This is a very powerful way of looking at the enterprise data integration problem. But it will generate a lot of traffic on the network, so get ready.
-- Alden Hart, chief technology officer, The Adrenaline Group, Arlington, Va.

UNIFIED MESSAGING WINS
By 2005, voice mail will cease to be a business and will be 100% replaced by unified messaging. The voice mail installed base will be completely replaced by 2010.
-- Mark C. Straton, senior vice president, Siemens Enterprise Networks, Reston, Va.

GIGABIT ETHERNET PREVAILS
The LAN has adopted Gigabit Ethernet, the MAN is following suit, and the WAN will experience the Gigabit Ethernet revolution over the next two years. Why? Large enterprises are now facing the ultimate IT challenge: to deliver anything business line managers require over the existing network. With the help of technologies like Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing, WAN managers will embrace Gigabit Ethernet for the high bandwidth, efficient provisioning, scalability and ease of use.
-- Robert W. Norton, founder and vice president, Select Inc., Westwood, Mass.

THE BIG YEAR: 2005
Corporate IT spending will start to grow by the end of 2003, followed by increased telecom spending toward the end of 2004. I think 2005 will be a big year for networking: Carriers will offer Ethernet data services over copper, wireless service providers will offer 802.11 data services on a wide scale, and video-on-demand over IP services will be available.
-- Ray Kao, CEO and CTO, Polaris Networks Inc., San Jose

PRIVATE LINES, R.I.P.
Virtual private networks will become the dominant means for interconnecting corporate networks. Increasingly, we'll see VPNs overtake traditional approaches such as private lines.
-- Hossein Eslambolchi, CTO, AT&T Corp.

SECURITY ABSORPTION
By the year 2005, intrusion-detection systems, packet filtering, and firewall and VPN appliances will be almost completely absorbed into devices such as switches, routers and wireless access points. This is driven by the fact that the devices are becoming more intelligent, as well as a critical need to make security services reach all points of connection in an enterprise network.
-- John Roese, CTO, Enterasys Networks Inc., Rochester, N.H.

AT&T ACQUIRED
In 2003, AT&T will be acquired by one of the Baby Bells - most likely BellSouth, but SBC Communications will still be in the running. WorldCom will sell off its frame-relay and telephone businesses and focus on IP, recognizing that its only sustainable assets are its customers and the UUnet backbone.
-- Mark Tuomenoksa, chairman and founder, OpenReach Inc., Woburn, Mass.

SMART REDUNDANCY
Because of the turbulence in the telecom market, prudent businesses will take advantage of plummeting prices for data lines and always have redundant lines from two vendors, both for reliability purposes and for protection if a carrier goes bankrupt. Turns out it's a cheaper way to pay for business continuity. Remember what happened when several DSL vendors closed their doors and left their customers high and dry. So move to public nets, but use both suspenders and a belt!
-- Sheldon Laude, CenterBeam

FIREWALLS 2.0
Firewalls as they are now employed will become irrelevant by 2006 . Because of the increasing adoption and rollout of Web applications, which flow over Port 80, today's firewalls will become increasingly ineffective unless they evolve to inspect at the content layer. Next-generation firewall-like security must be able to inspect, filter and deny access at the application content level, not just the network layer.
-- Erik Giesa, director of product management, F5 Networks Inc., Seattle