The Network is the Platform
Abstract：The network is the most cost-effective platform companies can u to integrate complex interactions for incread value and growth
Most chief executive officers (CEOs) today are concerned about growth - and building their companies' capacity to grow, according to Cisco CEO John Chambers. "It doesn't matter where we are in the world," says Chambers. "Wherever I go, the first thing CEOs talk about is growth."
"The cond thing they want to discuss is how to build in the capability to grow, to u information technology (IT) to help enable - and perhaps even change - their business strategy, and how to do that with flexibility and agility," he adds.
Today, business leaders are realizing that, by increasing the value of each transaction rather than simply trying to increa the number of transactions, they can enjoy a greater growth trajectory and better return on investment. By encouraging employees, partners a
nd vendors to work more creatively and providing them with the IT tools to be more effective in their roles, companies are successfully transforming simple transactions into much more valuable interactions.
"In the next decade or two, interactions will bring a whole new level of innovation to us -- the ability to drive productivity at results that are five, ten maybe twelve times greater than what we have en in the past. And one of the technologies that helps them increa the value of their transactions - and to move from transactions to interactions - is the network," Chambers explains.
The Interactions Net
This 'Interactions Net' - an evolution of the way people communicate - signals that the technology ctor's center of gravity is shifting to a standards-bad platform: the Internet Protocol (IP) network. In this context, a platform has three basic attributes: it is bad on open standards or interfaces; it is extensible and customizable, providing new market development possibilities; and it is pervasive. When the characteristics align, a huge n
ew window of opportunity opens.
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As this new pha of interactions-centric development unfolds, the ubiquity and extensibility of IP is being combined with new levels of intelligence and capability to create the right network to rve as the basis for real-time business interactions. And the applications of the future are increasingly empowered by this network platform.
"The network is no longer just infrastructure, not just bandwidth," Chambers obrves. "Instead, it is emerging as a cure platform for delivering the customized experience that 21st century consumers expect - whether that means delivering new rvices as a carrier, boosting productivity for business of any size or consumers looking for real-time, personalized entertainment and rvices." Blogs, wikis, social networks and collaborative applications all exemplify the new types of communication environment that the network enables.
琅琊榜太子"As the ever-more-intelligent network evolves into a platform, each of us will be able to communicate from any device and in whatever mode we choo," Chambers says.
As the center of the Interactions Net, the network itlf is emerging as an important IT platform - like the microprocessor, which has led innovation for the past 25 years. And the emergence of the network as a platform is changing the entire value chain of IT and placing the network squarely at the center of innovation: as many as 14 billion devices will be connected to the Internet by 2010, fueled by more and more computing tasks now being handled online, from phone calls to personalized arches to downloading entertainment.
The communications transformation has many facets:
Network of Networks | Network as the Platform |
Connectivity | 远见的意思Collaboration |
河南科技学院图书馆Transactions | Interactions |
Phone, E-mail, Voice Mail | Converged Real-Time
Communication |
Storage Area Networks | Virtual Storage |
Multiple Service Systems儿童皮肤过敏 | Quadruple Play Services |
| |
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东施效颦Storage provides an example of this evolution. "Our storage at Cisco is ud much more intelligently today than it was just a few years ago," Chambers points out. "More and more, we're using a network-bad, intelligent storage model in which resources are added to and deleted from the network independent of the applications they support. Instead of allocating storage to particular processor tasks, we just put it up on the network, make it available and the network can intelligently map which resources go with which application resources." This virtualization incread storage utilization by 20 to 30 percent, dramatically incread operational efficiency and led to millions of dollars in annual savings.
The Communications Company of the Future
Cisco is leading the transition to a network-centric technology environment. By combining its core strength (IP) with intelligence, the company is creating a powerful communications platform that will rve as the basis for the convergence of data, voice, video and mobile communications systems in a cure, integrated architecture.
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The success that Cisco has achieved in recent years has come from continuously planning three to five years ahead, thereby managing to get ahead of important market transitions. That foresight continues to be the basis of its strategy moving forward.
"Historically, the transitions we've been a part of have been technological; they've been relatively orderly and predictable," Chambers notes. "Now, however, we're eing a wider-reaching, more dramatic transition. So our ability to predict successfully where the market will go is even more critical and offers much greater potential import for the company."
