While the IP network is becoming the primary communications conduit with new voice and video applications, networked applications are becoming key competitive differentiators for businesses of all shapes and sizes. Traditionally, successful businesses were those that could aggregate data throughout the ecosystem in which they operate. Today, the ability of a business to appropriately process and disseminate data for customers, suppliers, employees, and partners is a far greater determinant of success.
The network-based businesses of the dot-com era &(!!#x97!!); Amazon, Google, and Yahoo! &(!!#x97!!); are well known. Less visible but increasingly important is the role new information services are playing across every industry. From FedEx's supply chain management tools to text messages from the neighborhood dry cleaner, competitive advantage is increasingly dependent on the network.
In addition, the challenge of conducting business across distance is driving collaboration and business processes to the network. Voice, email, wikis, blogs, videoconferencing, telepresence, and every other communications tool likely to appear in the near future are all network based. IDC believes network-based business services and collaborative tools have many years of continued creation and innovation ahead.
IDC surveys of line-of-business managers reflect this trend. Over the past three years, when these managers were asked what they want from IT, the response has shifted from cost savings to business enablement. This business enablement is about enabling collaboration within an ecosystem as well as streamlining and providing transparency into a wide range of business processes. IDC believes as the scale and importance of network-based businesses continue to grow, the demand for network infrastructure will remain strong.
If enterprises needed network devices only for basic packet forwarding and routing, almost any supplier would suffice. Trade magazines would be filled with performance tests and discussions of throughput and price/performance/port density ratios. Bandwidth would be tightly tied to Moore's law as processors scaled up and drove packet-handling performance predictably upward. This is not the case.
Bandwidth and performance are important. However, other challenges such as improving network reliability in the face of a growing mix of applications, enhancing security, deploying WLAN, enabling mobility, and migrating voice networks to IP all represent additional functionality demands that networking vendors have yet to fully satiate.
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