Tel Aviv - The corporate networks of the future will not just span larger distances and handle more data at higher speeds, they also will be smarter, if 3Com Corp. CEO and Chairman Eric Benhamou's predictions come true.
Speaking yesterday to a group of Israeli high-tech firms and venture capitalists at the Mediterranean Technology Round Table Exhibition (METRE) being held here, Benhamou said networks will not just need to be faster and more reliable, but they will have to be able to tell the difference between certain kinds of data in order to give priority to business-critical applications. In other words, networks will need to be policy-based, Benhamou said.
Right now, high-level network applications, such as real-time network monitoring and two-way voice and video, are given the same priority in a network as low-level applications, such as noncritical e-mail and Web browsing, Benhamou said. In addition, applications used by employees across a company, from the CEO down to the receptionist, are given the same treatment - something that needs to change in order to make networks more apt to serve business needs, he said.
"Not all users [in a network] should be treated the same," Benhamou said.
The technology exists within 3Com and its closest competitors - Cisco Systems, Inc. and Bay Networks, Inc. - to build this kind of "intelligence" into the network, Benhamou said. However, there are very few applications available to take advantage of policy-based networking, he said. Because of the lack of software, networking will not begin to advance as quickly as it could until 2000 at the earliest, he said. Most software applications on the market today are not "intelligent" enough to distinguish between and separate voice, video and data traffic - something that will be imperative to a policy-based network, he said.
In addition to policies within a LAN, there also will be software that allows data to tunnel across different layers of a WAN, Benhamou said. For example, nonsensitive e-mail sent from a company's office in California to its office in New York would go via the public switched network, while a videoconference between two top-level managers would automatically be sent over the company's ATM network, he said. Different types of data will travel between clients and servers in their own virtual tunnels, depending on a set of predefined policies, he said.
On top of all the policies, software must be created that can constantly manage the policies put in place, so rules can be enforced 24 hours a day, Benhamou added.
So when can we expect to see networks with this kind of built-in technology? Whenever the applications are ready for it, Benhamou said.
