There’s a whole hyperconnected world coming up on the Blindside
Just as Chris Wren envisaged St Paul’s before a stone had been laid, so John Roese (Nortel CTO, also on the board of OLPC to whom I am listening as I type) sees a hyperconnected world.
[all this E&OE]Networks connect people, but he sees they will connect every thing, and every application. Consumers assume (and not because technologists offered the idea) that broadband will be everywhere. Consumer home IT and phones set the pace now, not work IT.
His word for what is coming is “hyperconnectivity”. We ship 10bns of microprocessors a year, he says, of which maybe 2% are connected to the net. But they’d all be more valuable if they were. The iPhone is not just another phone; it’s the first connected iPod, which is a lot more interesting. Speaking of OLPC he notes that the icon-driven laptop increases literacy far faster than books. So let’s connect kids everywhere.
He asks us how big the UK-wide government and IT comms ecosystem will be in 10 years? Heavens, I have no idea…3-4m nodes? (If there are 5m staff). No - if every application and entity is connected, it’ll be 10s, 100ms, even billions. Hell’s teeth. Imaging the civil service phone directory with an entry for everyone’s every openoffice application. (I cant speak right now but my blog will call you back…)
He says we’ll have to make the online communications experience as rich as the real life one. The 2-3G mobile connection won’t do it, 4g may start to feel more like it. The systems we put in place now will have to scale to accomodate everyone, everything and every application not just workforces. This isnt 10 years away; we’re entering this phase now.
His three tips are:
Simplify the transport (I take this to mean transport layer, not car v bicycles). IP is not the universal solution; it’s a mask to hide complexity. The technology, standards and costs are different. So the user experience cant be the same. Do we mask the complexity, or get rid of it? Using Ethernet-like transport, packet based, flat and hierarchical endpoint. Wifi today is the model for 4G tomorrow. from Sept 2008: 500mb from a mobile phone, and wifi as the primary access network. We think by 2010 wiring the building will be a choice, not a necessity.
All this simplification means a 40, 60, 80% reduction in capital and operating costs. The user sees a “clear pipe” when you cut out all the gateways. We should elimitate components, not add them.
We have to focus on mobilising our enterprises. We create infrastructure for LANs, but that’s not how people will work. Outlook web access is unecessary in the long term - it just dumbs own emai so it oesnt overwhelm the network. Dont optimise them to woToday our information and our tools to communicate are in different places. The time taken to go from one to the other is huge, and human capacity is finite capital. So we have to embed communication functioNs where the information lives: “unified communications”. This means comms functions in any appn or ecospace where comms are needed, and a network that can deal with every device, application, interface and place. He evokes the idea of skills-based routing so you only call the someone with the right skills who is actually available. (Imagine health or welfare self-help call services where you dial a number which means I want tospeak to someone who has been through the same experience, and who’s willing to help and who’s available to talk right now…
Take comple functions and make then simple: eg on a complex formula in a spreadsheet or a cluase in a contract “click to collaborate” and set upa conference call.
Our unified workplace comms strategies have to extend home, across boundaries, have to federate. Not just inside hyour organisation, but the peope you need to communicate with across boundaries. This determines the size of your comms ecosystem: not the number of staff, but the number of nodes, consulmers, and all their applications.
On that scale, complexity is our enemy. We cant continue to build disconnected technology that is made whole by human capital. So his prescription is:
Simplify the transport layer
Mobilize the enterprise
Comms-enable your applications
Phew. Why did I never learn shorthand?
July 15th, 2007 at 4:03 pm
As an attendee at the same event, I notice with gentle and world-weary irony (am I permitted such an attitude?) that Nick Welsh from the CSIA showed us the component list for his emergency portable secure communications unit that he could take to the scene of an emergency. The number of different protocols he had to consider was scary–I kept waiting for him to include a box of matches in case he needed smoke signals. Hyperconnectivity is a sweet and luscious looking jam, but it’s jam tomorrow.