Enter the Intelligent Network

Computerworld - In today's global marketplace, with its shrinking product life cycles and shorter time-to-market windows, business success is measured by the speed with which an organization can gather and analyze data, and effectively execute plans based on that analysis. The fundamental reason IT exists is to help companies succeed with that endeavor by providing two things: business transparency and agility.

Transparency can best be described as a comprehensive view of the business environment in real time—the ability to collect and share data anytime, anywhere, whether external information from partners and customers, or internal data across business functions, product groups or geographies. Agility is the organization's ability to quickly and efficiently act on that information, adapting to new market conditions by adding, removing, integrating or changing business processes.

Unfortunately, the current IT model is limited in its ability to provide true business transparency and agility. Despite enormous IT investments, vital networked resources and information assets remain largely unlinked. Large organizations today have literally hundreds of separately deployed or "siloed" applications and disparate databases and an infrastructure that has grown rapidly without any real systematic planning. Resources are uncoordinated. Multiple, distributed systems are difficult to manage and require extensive programming and systems integration. Due to the ad hoc nature in which we've grown our enterprises, multiple layers and overlay infrastructure further exacerbate the problems of integration and management and waste IT dollars with redundant functionality and underused resources. Even organizations adept at planning will encounter these challenges; it is a natural consequence of the organic growth of IT.

Initiatives such as IBM's On Demand Computing and HP's Adaptive Enterprise promise to meet these challenges by enabling computer resources to be dynamically allocated to users on an as-needed basis and tightly integrating business processes with IT. It's a lofty goal that is gaining traction: In a recent Computerworld online survey, 32% of the 765 respondents said they are pursuing, piloting or have deployed an on-demand computing model, while 30% are investigating the option. But it won't be possible to achieve the promised nirvana without a fundamental rethinking of the network itself—the foundation on which the IT infrastructure is built. Furthermore, enterprises aren't going to abandon their client/server architectures overnight. IT managers need ways to reduce complexity, increase integration and decrease costs now, as they prepare for the evolution to this more adaptive infrastructure. The answers can be found by re-examining the way we design and build networks and moving to a systems-based approach called "intelligent networking."

Why an Intelligent Network?

The network is the one element of the infrastructure that touches all others, from the middleware and applications to the servers and end users. It is, therefore, a logical place to implement changes that can cost-effectively scale to impact the entire organization.