CHICAGO - Businesses need to upgrade their networks to support more efficient interactions with their business partners, suppliers and customers, according to the keynote panel that opened Supercomm 2005 Monday.

"There are new levels of collaboration that will require new enterprise infrastructure," said Toby Redshaw, corporate vice president of IT strategy for Motorola. "The anchor is the human being at work, at home, in the car, at a supplier office - doing work in very different ways throughout the day."

Convergence of voice, video and data onto corporate networks will streamline this process and give businesses better performance overall, panelists said.

Supply chains that bring needed resources from around the world must be set up quickly and securely and be reliable, Redshaw said.

Businesses that have not started to shift their infrastructure to support this model need to start now in a big way, said Charlie Feld, executive vice president of portfolio management for EDS. "The biggest challenge for businesses is how do they get from the old infrastructure to the new?" he said. " It's almost as if new companies have an advantage over those that have been around for 40 or 50 years."

Reliability is key because with more just-in-time supply of materials, network downtime translates immediately into lost revenues. "It's not important to know that a server went down or a network segment went down," Feld said. "It's important to know if I'm making cars in this plant and am I making ball bearings in Brazil. If the supply chain goes down, you're not making a profit."

Embracing new technologies enables international construction firm Bechtel to set up networks in field offices faster and with better performance, said Geir Ramleth, the company's CIO. An IPSec VPN at the core of the company's network that is pushed to remote sites has cut networking costs dramatically, he said. For instance, international connections have dropped from $7,500 per megabit of bandwidth per month to about $1,500 with the VPN, and from $3,500 to $500 in the U.S., he said. On one job in Egypt, the price went from $24,000 per megabit to $1,000.

The company has also embraced VoIP at remote sites where workers plug IP phones into the network and the calls are handled by a central Cisco call server. "We don't need a PBX. We put IP phones out there and we're in business," Ramleth said.