ComputerScope on 30 years of technology in Ireland

Three battles shaped the networkNetworking has changed enormously in 30 years but three key battles really shaped the industry and provided winners and losers each time. Each milestone revolved around competing visions and competing vendors and left many resellers and customers with hard choices to make over which horse to back.

“The one prediction we can confidently make for the next 30 years is of course change. Just when one vendor seemingly has a chokehold on networking another upstart rises up to challenge them,” Darragh Richardson, MD

Battle of the Standards

The pivotal Ethernet versus Token Ring battle took place in the late 80’s and throughout the 90s, with IBM championing the original Token Ring standard whilst just about everybody else eventually sided with the new boy on the block — Ethernet. The final death knell was when Cisco dropped out of the effort to advance High-Speed Token-Ring in 1998. Ethernet won out and IBM eventually sold up — exiting with DEC and leaving the networking world to a new breed of vendor. This led inexorably to the next battle…

Battle of the Architects

Who can forget Bay Networks rallying cry of the late 90’s “switch when you can, route when you must”? The routing versus switching war was part of a broader race to control the networking market with legacy switch vendors like Cabletron, Bay, and 3Com advocating a flat layer 2 switched infrastructure. On the other side standing alone was Cisco with its router heritage and a hierarchical router design which allowed better segmentation of traffic. Cisco would ultimately win out when it locked up Layer 3 switching to complement its router dominance, although elements of this battle still rumble on even to this day, leading to…

Battle of the ecosystem

Through the 2000’s Cisco continued to grow its technology leadership taking on legacy voice vendors as the convergence wars around IPT/VoIP raged through the noughties. Joined latterly by HP (who swallowed up 3Com and recently Aruba) these behemoths promise an ‘end-to-end’ vision which offer VARs and customers alike (at least on PowerPoint!) a single, simple, integrated choice of networking technologies. On the other hand challengers have sprung up over the past 15 years with technically superior stand-alone solutions but their challenge is how to integrate into complimentary vendors. The key to this battle will be how interoperable and standards based the niche players are and whether the incumbents will keep writing large cheques to acquire challengers or may themselves split up as we are witnessing HP and Symantec currently doing.

In conclusion

The one prediction we can confidently make for the next 30 years is of course change. Just when one vendor seemingly has a chokehold on networking another upstart rises up to challenge them. Likewise VARs will come and go as mergers, acquisitions and takeovers will change the landscape. 30 years ago DEC and IBM did battle while upstarts 3Com and Cabletron were on the rise. Where Cara, Lancoms, and Topology once dominated the local VAR market, emerging stars have risen since to offer customers new choice. Certainly our view in Agile is that market disruption will continue as we look to partner with the winners of the next round of network evolution. If our short history of four years is anything to go by there are plenty of battles still left to fight!

Darragh Richardson, managing director

What has been the biggest change in IT over the last 30 years? Easy, the Internet and growth of information. In a little over 30 years, the Internet has gone from being the ultimate secret to being the ultimate public tool through which many people choose to live their lives. Beginning as a top secret research project to enable underground US nuclear sites to communicate with each other in the event that the Russians finally pressed the big red button, the Internet today is not only a valuable business tool, but has also become a social requirement.

“Reports of the impending demise of Moore’s Law have been greatly exaggerated and the near future will probably see circuits on a microprocessor measured on an atomic scale with quantum computers, harnessing the power of atoms and molecules to perform processing and memory tasks,” Kevin Reid, CTO

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, SnapChat and countless other social media tools are used by people to extend their social circles and share more of what’s happening in their lives. Over 12 billion messages sent daily by Facebook users alone, a huge explosion in information that the electronic world is facilitating.

While much of this is a positive thing, where do we draw the line on privacy issues? Or is this an issue? Is it a generational thing and the children of the Internet see sharing as normal; privacy is not their default setting. What about the Internet of Things though? By 2020 it is anticipated that there will be 50 billion objects connected this way which will be fabulous for getting your lights and heating turned on just in time for your arrival home on a cold night. Your average family home already probably has upwards of seven-eight smart devices and smart phones are great but they constantly report where a person is. A smart burglar can drop a sensor outside a front door to learn about a person’s habits, build a pattern over what they do.

Ads based on preferences picked up by advertisers follow us across the internet; will they soon follow us up and down the street? And all the time the information pile increases.

Reports of the impending demise of Moore’s Law have been greatly exaggerated and the near future will probably see circuits on a microprocessor measured on an atomic scale with quantum computers, harnessing the power of atoms and molecules to perform processing and memory tasks, continuing to drive the incredibly fast growth in computing power. To put the growth of computing power into context, Intel’s CEO Brian Krzanich explained that if a 1971 VW Beetle had advanced at the pace of Moore’s Law, today you “would be able to go with that car 300,000 miles per hour. You would get two million miles per gallon of gas, all for a mere cost of four cents.”

But while the amount of information we create, use and store grows exponentially, perhaps the threshold of our ability to use it intelligently is being neared. All this data is stored and available to use but how will we locate it? How will we verify it? How will we differentiate it? How will information-providers commercialise it? International trade in the early days was a suck-it-and-see proposition; the trader would hope the price would be advantageous when the goods finally came back from a far-flung destination.
Transatlantic cables started resolving this problem. An example of the desire for quick access to information was shown by a trader who had his Ethernet cables cut shorter to reduce latency. This shortened his waiting time by nano-seconds so it was utterly pointless but maybe it earned him a promotion.

I’ll leave you with IBM’s Watson, an AI super-computer. While it previously would have taken IBM’s team of lawyers around three months to analyse companies for potential merger and acquisition targets, Watson produced an accurate list of targets in just thirty minutes. The beauty of being able to access, verify and analyse huge quantities of information in super-quick time.

Watson was also victorious when tasked with challenging two ultimate champions on US TV show Jeopardy!, a task it won with ease, One defeated contestant, Ken Jennings, afterwards offered an ominous remark: “Just as factory jobs were eliminated in the 20th century by new assembly-line robots, Brad and I were the first knowledge-industry workers put out of work by the new generation of ‘thinking’ machines. ‘Quiz show contestant’ may be the first job made redundant by Watson, but I’m sure it won’t be the last.”

In 1985 nobody predicted with accuracy what 2015 would look like. All we know today is the next 30 years in this age of the Internet and vast quantities of data will bring huge opportunity for information and technology to vastly improve our lives. Let’s hope we use it wisely.

Kevin Reid, CTO

Enterprise Solutions are in operation since 1997 and the company was established with Citrix, and the remote access it offers, in mind. That offering has continued into the solutions we provide today, but now we call it Mobility. The arrival of wireless technology, smart phones, tablets and 4G have all meant that a mobile workspace can be a reality.

“Mobility and mobile workspaces have become a true demand, with people not only wanting to, but expecting to be able to work from anywhere and on-the-go,” Niamh O’Donovan, senior account manager

 

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Mobility and mobile workspaces have become a true demand, with people not only wanting to, but expecting to be able to work from anywhere and on-the-go. With this in mind, Enterprise Solutions would consider the advancement of communications as one of the technology milestones of the past few decades. Now we see the challenges that this has brought with it; secure remote access and quality of service being two examples.

Work is a thing you do and not a place you go; this mantra exists for both corporate and SMB businesses. For this reason Enterprise Solutions embraces Citrix and its product set as we consider Citrix to be one of the most proactive and adaptive companies. Its suite of products complement each other to offer an end-to-end solution for remote and mobile access that considers all elements including from security to user-experience. The solutions may be delivered via a cloud based hosted desktop for SMB businesses or an on-premise virtualised infrastructure in the corporate space. Enterprise Solutions use Citrix based technology to offer mobility to all users.

Enterprise Solutions understand that the priorities of both the business and the deliverables of the IT department need to marry, and we look forward to working with our clients for the next 30 years to help them achieve the balance.

Niamh O’Donovan, senior account manager