NetEvents Garmisch, February 23/24th

Take a long look to the future

From Software Defined Networking to next generation Ethernet, from tomorrow’s cyber threats to a new era in consolidation… we are entering an era of massive transformation, and NetEvents Garmisch points the way

We live in interesting times, and this week’s NetEvents 2012 EMEA Press and Analyst Summit presents an outstanding program of visionary solutions and forward thinking on the hottest topics in ICT tomorrow and today.

Judge a revolution by the quality of its leaders: Deutsche Telekom, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Verizon, and Yahoo! got together to rethink networking and accelerate Software Defined Networking (SDN) standards and solutions. Their first conference was massively over-subscribed – a sign of a world hungry for this revolution. The Garmisch conference program begins with a keynote by Dan Pitt, one of SDN’s key champions – but he won’t have an easy ride as we also have Ian Keene from Gartner hot on his heels to debate the market politics that might muddy the Open Network Foundation’s waters.

The second day’s guest speaker, Carolyn Crandall from Riverbed Technology, will introduce a new, evolutionary concept in IT consolidation – and the challenges it presents to the enterprise. Other challenges debated include sessions on: datacenter transformation, managing change in the enterprise, and a new level of intelligent security solutions to meet fast evolving cyber threats.

“The only constant is change” is a quote dating back to Heraclitus, and in the IT world those constants include Moore’s Law and the on-going evolution of Ethernet. So what could be more remarkable than the presence at NetEvents Garmisch of Bob Metcalfe, the father of Ethernet, announcing not just an evolution but an actual new generation of Ethernet… Once more: “You heard it first at NetEvents!”.

The most intense competition arises at the interface between great currents – and “Mobile” and “Cloud” are the two most dynamic currents in IT

today. So we are especially privileged to end the program with Cisco’s Roland Klemann sharing his vision of the mobile cloud – following a final debate on boosting profitability from mobile services.

We look forward to two days of visionary presentations, lively debate and discussion with industry leaders and the top EMEA media. More than 50 ICT business publications are represented at this summit covering 12+ countries throughout the EMEA region. Stay tuned….

NetEvents Portugal 2008

Last week saw yet another successful NetEvents event, this time in sunny Portugal in the Algarve.

A wide range of vendors attended, and the event kicked off with a keynote by Bernd Schumacher from Nokia Siemens Networks. He argued from both business and technical standpoints that the only way to connect five billion extra people to the Internet was to use IP-based Carrier Ethernet.

While no-one seemed likely to disagree with his argument from a technical point of view, the problem for carriers is, as ever, how they're going to get from here to there.

Right now their networks are full of old and often not-so-old TDM-based equipment. This is stuff that supports circuit-switched voice traffic and is perceived in the industry as being outdated. You'll find the work 'legacy' applied pejoratively to this technology - mainly by vendors of the new stuff.

This means though that there's a huge cost sunk into TDM equipment. To rip and replace would be hideously expensive -- and even if the world economy were as robust as it was two years ago, no carrier can afford simply to chuck it all away and start again. So Schumacher argued that carriers need to build business models that allow them to develop and sell services, thus generating revenues to fund new networks.

The problem is, as Schumacher did acknowledge, that his telco customers have not traditionally been that successful at doing this. Instead, third parties have come along and built services on top of their networks, and so creamed off the revenues. Think Yahoo, Google and YouTube.

Following a light grilling on stage from the moderator and the audience, Schumacher made way for the first plenary debate session. This was on the CIO's perspective of enterprise networking, introduced by Evelien Wiggers from IDC. Along with the panellists, the discussion covered how CIOs can manage the increasingly complex networks of which they are in charge. This includes issues such as device management, which is showing signs of getting out of control as suers continue to attach phones, PDAs and memory sticks to the network.

Debate II asked if the mobile operators have done enough with their recent femtocell initiatives to see off the challenge from Wi-Fi. Introduced by Dean Bubley of Disruptive Analaysis, the panel argued one way and the other, with the wireless vendors such as Trapeze pitching for Wi-Fi, while the likes of Motorola argued that the operators needed to improve coverage - via femtocells.

With Debate III, the event attacked the issue of interconnecting islands of Ethernet across the globe. The question here is how carriers can link up their differently configured and specified Ethernet networks to deliver a seamless and easily managed experience for the enterprise. The debate, under the command of Gartner's Ian Keene, concluded that the key issue was manageability.

The final session of day one was more relaxed, as the irrepressible Steve Broadhead from Broadband Testing leaped onstage and asserted that he hated security - and demanded to know what the industry was going to do about it. The panellists were charged making security too expensive, inconvenient and hard to manage. Naturally given the nature of the topic, there was no hard and fast answer to Broadhead's heartfelt plea.

The event then broke into press/vendor meetings, punctuated by a dinner at the Casa Valha. The next day, with some bleary eyes in evidence, NetEvents Portugal resumed its final plenary session after more press/vendor meetings and lunch. Debate IV's topic asked whether 100 Gigabit Ethernet is ready to roll. Surprisingly, the panel's conclusion was that it is -- more or less. While we won't see mass deployments for a few years, the technology's standardisation is well under way -- it just needs to fall in price from its current astronomical levels.

The final debate before the assembly broke up to head for the airport discussed how data centres could be made greener. While everyone agreed that there more energy could and can be saved, there was also acknowledgement that this had to be balanced with the need for the data centre to be over-sized to allow for expansion, as new technology and tools helps to resolve the problem.

The next events will be held in October in China for the Asian press, while Barcelona, not coincidentally the venue for Mobile World Congress, will see the next European event in February 2009. See here for details.

NetEvents TV launches new site

Exciting times ahead! We've just revamped the NetEvents TV site - it went live this week. And we're doubling the volume of content we publish every month -- starting from this month.

New site design
The site changes are more evolutionary than revolutionary -- we've had a lot of positive feedback on the site's look and feel, and don't want to chuck out the proverbial baby with the bathwater. All the same, there were lots of things we wanted to change, especially with respect to the way that visitors navigate our video content.

There's probably a lot more content up on the site than you imagine -- but how can you find it? If you know what you're looking for, you can always use the search facility, which works well. But if you're browsing, it's a bit of a different story.

So we've changed the way that the navigation works while retaining the same basic look and feel, just freshening it up a bit. With the old site, you navigated the content according to the format the content was in. For example, the main tabs were titled Spotlights, Industry Leaders, Webinars, and so on.

We thought we could improve on that by exposing the content itself. So for example, the new main categories accessible from the front page include Telco Infrastructure, Enterprise Applications & Services, Security, and Mobile & Wireless. This means that you can drill down through our content according to what interests you rather than the format it's in.

That said, the baby remains firmly wedged in the bath. If you want to look at content by format, you still can. For example, there's a CxO Perspectives channel, where you can view videos of interviews and keynotes by IT industry leaders. Yet the quality of the content and how you view it on our site both remain the same, as does the ability to view it in any one of six languages -- a unique service which no comparable site can offer.

We're also planning an exciting channel that will see industry execs going head-to-head -- with even more planned for upcoming months.

Your comments on the changes are more than welcomed - especially if you spot any bugs....

More content
And there's more content -- from the start of September 2008, you'll find us posting two documentaries every month, one covering broadly enterprise communications issues, the other covering telecommunications topics.

The first of our double-content months sees a focus on Ethernet. Regular readers will have seen our History of Ethernet documentary starring Bob Metcalfe, inventor of the technology. Now we've looked forward and have a new documentary on the future of Ethernet, which also includes an interview with Metcalfe.

And since Ethernet is such a broad church, we couldn't resist covering one of the most challenging technological developments -- 100 gigabit Ethernet -- in the second of our documentaries.

Check out our front page for more....

Can ZigBee succeed?

The killer app for ZigBee is energy management. That's according to Bob Metcalfe, to whom I've just been talking in Boston, at a gathering of the Metro Ethernet Forum.

Metcalfe is the inventor of Ethernet, the physical underpinning of pretty much every network on the planet, from your home Wi-Fi to the high-speed interconnects used in data centres and the international links that tie the world's telecommunications together.

Metcalfe's been a partner in VC firm Polaris Ventures since 2001, and one of his current projects is Amber Wireless, a company that develops ZigBee components. "As CSR is to Bluetooth, so Amber will be to Zigbee", was his comment.

CSR? Your mobile phone probably has a CSR-branded Bluetooth chip inside it -- the company claims to dominate the market for Bluetooth silicon.

So what's ZigBee? It's a 2.4GHz wireless technology that's designed to connect embedded devices. We're talking light switches, environmental sensors, solenoids and so on -- devices that currently tend to work standalone and whose operating principles are based on whatever is programmed into them at design time.

Metcalfe's a network guy so his take is that such devices need to be connected, not just for control purposes, which was the original rationale for the development of Zigbee, but also to manage their energy consumption.

It's probably fair to say that, since customers for ZigBee are designers and manufacturers of embedded devices, unless you're one of those, chances are you won't hear much about it. But Metcalfe's argument for ZigBee's likelihood of success is that there are some 10 billion embedded devices out there -- even more than the current tally of mobile phones.

Is he right? With the world now alert to the need for energy savings, it's possible. Metcalfe freely admits that the Ethernet label is slapped for marketing reasons on pretty much any networking technology these days, so the Ethernet name has in effect acquired a life that doesn't have a direct connection with Metcalfe's invention. So Ethernet's success outside of the local area network isn't all Metcalfe's doing.

As a predictor of the future too, his track record is mixed: he once reckoned that the Internet would be dead by 1996.

But then, no futurologist or analyst has ever been 100 percent correct and, on the energy front, it's more likely that Metcalfe is pretty much on the button. Whether Zigbee becomes a core technology in the struggle to sustain human activity and energy consumption on an overcrowded planet remains to be seen.

But his views on the future importance of video (plug, plug) must surely be spot-on though...

Telecomms industry goes down to the crossroad

Las Vegas is not, I venture to suggest, a place where many sane individuals want to spend too much time -- especially in June when temperatures run into the hundreds (if you think in Fahrenheit), and probably for other, more obvious reasons too.

Yet that's where I find myself today, along with what seems to be half the western world's telecommunications industry.

We're here for NXTcomm08, the telecoms industry show, which finds the sector at a crossroads, as we unveil in our show highlights feature, new on the NetEvents TV website today.

The news feature includes an interview with the show's director about the show, and about the state of the industry and its big issues. Green issues are to the forefront, as of course is the thrust towards all-IP networks.

And it's the drive to IP that forms the backbone of our feature's interviews with the technology vendors. From show award-winner Hatteras Networks with its backhaul-boosting, copper aggregation technology to high-performance routers from Redback, from Aculabs' call routing systems to Sonus Networks' WiMax voice solutions, the emphasis from NXTcomm08 is on IP data. And that's just a handful of the many vendors we sampled.

While it's perhaps a slightly more subdued show compared to last year, according to some vendors, NXTcomm08 suggests that the telecoms operators' drive towards Ethernet continues to intensify. While many vendors and analysts believe that the old technologies will be around for at least a decade, maybe two, it's clear that some of the more nimble carriers -- largely those without a large legacy network and its accompanying customer base to maintain -- will be making that transition much quicker.

As an aside, you might wonder what's meant by 'a legacy network' -- 'legacy' of course being the industry-standard sneer at technology that's more than a handful of months old. In the telecoms business, the rhythm of technology upgrades necessarily moves at a slower pace. But even so, it was slightly shocking here at the show to hear ATM referred to as a legacy technology. It was not very long ago at all in telecoms industry years that ATM with its 53-byte cells was the latest, the greatest, and you'd be seeing it on your LAN before too long. O tempora, O mores!

But I digress. The crossroads for the telecoms industry is the one I mentioned in the last blog -- namely how a service provider can upgrade its network, add services people want to buy, and maintain a viable business model in a climate of falling prices. I'll leave it for you to wonder who the devil is in this scenario (think Robert Johnson).

So if you're interested in what the telecoms industry is about to dish up, NXTcomm08 is a pretty good place to start looking -- and, I self-interestedly submit, you might want to take a look at the NetEvents TV highlights features too.

The inexorable march of Ethernet

This, my first blog for NetEvents TV, is going to be a bit of a personal journey so please bear with me.

An IT journalist for over 20 years, communications has always been a fascinating topic. There's so much to go wrong it remains a source of amazement that it all works.

So little time ago, the loading of a network stack filled the PC's memory to the point where there was just enough room to run a stripped down word processor and that was it. Everything was manual. You had to tweak the various elements that talked to the hardware, the bit in the middle known as a shim, and then hope and pray that your application would tolerate the existence of a location that wasn't on the local machine. If not, it was game over, and the machine would just freeze, and it was time for the BRS - or big red switch.

And each vendor had their own way of doing things. Hoping that Novell's stack would talk to IBM's or DEC's was pushing your luck. Assuming, that is, that the thick yellow, 10Base5 Ethernet cable or, later, the thinner, 10 Base2 BNC cable hadn't been unplugged by someone who didn't realise that doing so would bring down the entire network.

And wireless connectivity was a black art, of use only to those who absolutely had to have it, such as people who work in warehouses and hospitals. For the rest of us, it was way too arcane and expensive.

Fast forward to 2008 and things could hardly be more different. Broadly speaking, networking just works. You plug in the cable or fire up the Wi-Fi and it connects.

Everything is standardised, whether you're using a phone, a laptop running Linux, a PC or a Mac. It's taken some doing but the extent to which a TCP/IP stack is now just a TCP/IP stack as opposed to being a product to which vendors insist on adding value by making it non-standard are - thankfully - long gone.

Where am I going with this? It's simply a paean of praise for those who dragged the technology to the point where it is today: among them are the engineers who did the hard work of making it so, the users who insisted with their wallets that vendors interoperate, and the standards bodies who created the detail that makes the interconnected world we now inhabit possible. And there's a big debate going on as to whether it ought to be the same stuff that connects the Earth to future space missions too.

So when you click on a link that connects you halfway across the globe to a server that contains the info you want, think for a second about the magic that makes it work -- and, if your character allows it, marvel at the technology.