Where Should Applications Live?

My apologies for being absent for a couple of days. I have been traveling for the past week an a half and will, the weather gods and US Air willing, hopefully make it home tonight. I'm presently in Washington, DC; yesterday was the last Network World IT Roadmap event of the year. Questions from the audience in my Enterprise Mobility session mostly involved network neutrality, not really surprising in a political town. Someone in the audience mentioned that Sprint wireless was blocking Google; I've not heard anything substantive about this. But it was remarkable that the level of interest in this topic was so high, especially since I like to focus on technology, not politics. OK, maybe a little politics; I can't resist, especially with an election coming up shortly.

I was in California earlier this week for a bunch of end-of-the-year projects, but I stopped by the opening session of Cisco's annual analyst meeting, C-Scape. I had not planned on attending, as this is a massive omnibus event with little on wireless and mobile. But it was interesting to see where Cisco is placing the corporate emphasis now, and it's applications, not network technology. For example, right off the bat in the opening session, there was no discussion of routers, switches, the Internet or Web, wireless,  network management, or a grand vision. Rather, the event began with a demo of Cisco's Webex-based telepresence app, conferencing three experts in far-flung locations to John Chambers, who conducted an interesting, high-level discussion of the value of networks in terms of productivity improvements and such. Yes, there were a couple of minor technical glitches, but videoconferencing 2.0, as I like to call it, shows great promise in finally convincing the airlines to improve customer service and legroom. Travel has become so burdensome that videoconferencing may finally become common in business. Keep in mind that the two Mbps upper bound on the definition of 3G was put in place largely to support videoconferencing, but, while we can get by with far less than that in terms of actual throughput, real-time on-demand video with decent quality will regardless remain a major challenge - and opportunity - for the wireless carriers going forward.

But there's a more interesting question at work here. Apart from the implication that advances in network technology are slowing to the point that Cisco is now getting into the applications business, there is a fundamental question of how intimately coupled an application should be to network infrastructure. I have for a long time supported the concept of what I call agile applications, which are in fact network-aware and can change their behavior based on the capabilities of the network upon which they are running at a particular moment in time. For example, a human resources application running in the office might provide photos and a video of a given employee's last performance review, but such features might be restricted or at least optional on a slow and expensive wide-area wireless connection. But what happens when the application moves into the network infrastructure itself, which is what I assume Cisco has in mind - apart from using network-intensive applications to drive hardware sales, of course? Cisco's emphasis is on applications that require a network and lots of bandwidth, like presence, telepresense (Cisco's high-end product here is clearly the state of the art), and collaboration (groupware 2.0) actually make a lot of sense embedded in the network, particularly for mobile users who need access to these facilities but will often have only lightweight devices that are little more than a browser. Porting code to any platform, big or small, can get expensive, especially when one considers the support costs.

Cisco, of course, also runs a risk of competing with those who are otherwise just users of their platforms, particularly application developers. But if the network equipment market is really maturing, Cisco's strategy could be a good one - and might regardless be of great benefit to those of us who get home far too infrequently.