InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
Hot In '97: Bandwidth Boom
Cross-platform: Novell Directory Services is expected to run on NT this year; it will also run on the most popular Unix platforms.Issue date: Jan. 6, 1997
Users' need for network bandwidth is growing faster than ever, fueled by the intranet-Internet boom and the increased use of other networked applications. This year, vendors expect to start rolling out technologies aimed at satisfying that demand: multimegabit remote-access technologies such as Digital Subscriber Line services and cable modems, conventional 56-Kbps modems, Gigabit Ethernet, and products that combine routing and switching functions. Cross-platform directory services, enterprise-management products, and asset-management tools are also likely to be hot topics.
Remote Access
Several technologies promise to provide remote users with much faster, low-cost access to corporate networks and the Internet. Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) technologies and cable modems are the fastest--but least proven--new options. Traditional modem vendors will offer a more pragmatic solution with
56-Kbps modems.
For IS, DSL technologies may have the biggest impact. Analysts expect that applications ranging from telecommuting to Internet access will drive the adoption of the new technology. Telecom carriers plan extensive trials and limited deployment of DSL services this year. They aim to get the price down to $50 to $100 per month for home and remote users. "1997 is going to be a very important year for DSL," says Kieren Taylor, an analyst with consulting firm TeleChoice Inc. in Verona, N.J .
The first DSL service to be available, Asymmetrical DSL, connects users to carriers' networks over three channels: a regular voice channel, a channel that delivers data "downstream" from the phone network to the user at 1.5 Mbps, and an "upstream" channel that works at 64 Kbps. Later in 1997, DSL modem makers plan to provide technology that delivers downstream data at 6.3 Mbps.
Ameritech, Bell Atlantic, GTE, and US West are already testing DSL. After limited deployment this year, these telecom companies are aiming for more widespread rollout in 1998. "There are no issues at this point that we see as unsolvable," says Flynn Nogueira, GTE's ADSL program manager.
Some early testers of GTE's service in Texas are thrilled. "ADSL has been great," says Mike Pilgrim, network and telecom manager for Watt Stopper, a Plano, Texas, manufacturer of energy-saving equipment. Watt Stopper engineers use ADSL to send and receive E-mail messages containing engineering drawings as big as 10 Mbytes. One drawback: Th e drawings take much longer to send than to receive, because of ADSL's 64-Kbps upstream limit.
Cable modems promise even faster data transmission--up to 30 Mbps, eventually. Cable companies say cable modem service will be priced as low as $30 to $50 per month. But the companies have encountered three major problems in their attempts to expand into data services: high modem costs, a lack of experience managing data networks, and a cable infrastructure designed to send broadband signals in one direction only.
With competing technologies such as DSL arriving, the cable industry must fix those problems soon, analysts say. "1997 will be a make-or-break year for the cable industry and data," says Gary Kim, president of consulting firm Itibiti Ventures in Littleton, Colo.
Set-top box maker Scientific-Atlanta Inc. in Atlanta will attack all three problems this year, starting with its dataXcellerator modem, which transmits data downstream at 1.2 Mbps. Users send data back at 64 Kbps via regular phone line s. When purchased in volume, dataXcellerator will sell for about $200. "This gives the cable companies something that they can roll out broadly," says Tom Steipp, a Scientific-Atlanta VP.
Motorola's Multimedia Group in Arlington Heights, Ill., also hopes to drive the market by making its CyberSurfr cable modem protocol available free, so other vendors can make compatible network equipment. Motorola already has 1 million orders for its modem.
Analysts expect both ADSL and cable modems to succeed. Forrester Research Inc., an IT advisory firm in Cambridge, Mass., estimates that 7 million cable modems will be installed in the United States by the year 2000. Vendors estimate 3.5 million ADSL lines will be in place worldwide by 1999, according to TeleChoice.
But before either ADSL or cable modems are widely available, users will have a more conventional way to get faster remote access: 56-Kbps analog modems, which are due to ship in the first quarter. Doubling the transmission speed of today's 28.8-Kbps modems, 56-Kbps modems are expected to add only $100 to the price.
But there are drawbacks to the technology. The modems operate at 56 Kbps only when they receive data; they send data at 28.8 Kbps. Also, two suppliers of the modems, Rockwell Semiconductor Systems and U.S. Robotics, are implementing incompatible versions. If the two companies agree on a standard, the effect on the market could be like a "lightning bolt" says Ernie Raper, a senior analyst at research firm VisionQuest 2000 Associates in Moorpark, Calif.
For IT managers, figuring out which remote access technology to use and how to implement it can be confusing. That's why many IS shops will outsource remote access services this year. "It is a lot easier to have someone else go out and do the homework," says Virginia Brooks, director of network research at Aberdeen Group Inc., a market research firm in Boston.
Many telecom carriers are keen to offer managed remote access services; some, like Ameritech in Chicago, already do. "A lot o f customers are finding that remote access is fine as a trial," says Greg Perisho, marketing manager at Ameritech, "but as the number of users starts to grow, all of sudden the IT manager realizes it's a full-time job." --Mary E. Thyfault and Beth Davis
Gigabit Ethernet
Within corporate networks, Gigabit Ethernet is expected to surge to the forefront. As its name implies, Gigabit Ethernet runs at up to 1 Gbps, 100 times the speed of standard Ethernet. With a draft standard expected early this year, several vendors plan to ship products in 1997, even though the full standard will not come until 1998.
The appeal of Gigabit Ethernet is its simplicity--it's good old Ethernet, but faster. Its drawbacks are that, unlike the competing asynchronous transfer mode, Gigabit Ethernet doesn't provide bandwidth allocation or guarantee smooth delivery--known as quality of service (QOS). So for many multimedia applications, ATM will probably still be a better choice. "Ethernet is simply not designed for QOS," says Michael Howard, president of Infonetics Inc., a San Jose, Calif., consulting and research company. "Its basic nature is antithetical to setting up reserved bandwidth or connections."
Routing/Switching
Another logical step forward from today's mainstream internetworking technology will be products that mix the intelligence of routing with the speed of switching. In 1997, several competing technologies--Cisco's Tag Switching, IBM's and other vendors' versions of IP switching, and 3Com's Fast IP--will start shipping in product form. Bay Networks is also expected to incorporate a marriage of routing and switching in its products. More LAN switches will include the ability to make elementary routing decisions.
Users who have early experience with IP LAN switching say it's both fast and easy to use. "Everything is just like we're used to in our routing environment," says Noemi Berry, network systems engineer at NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., which uses switches from startup Ipsilon.
-- Monua Janah
Directory Services
With corporate networks rapidly becoming bigger and more diverse, cross-platform directory services will be key technologies. Banyan Systems is pushing its StreetTalk for Microsoft's Windows NT. Novell, the market leader in directory services, is expected to complete the port of its Novell Directory Services to NT; NDS also will run on the most popular Unix platforms. Microsoft's own directory service is not expected to ship with NT 5.0 until late this year or 1998.
Another hot cross-platform technology is Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, which provides a standard way to access a directory service. "As we move to an intranet infrastructure over the next 18 months, we are considering an LDAP-enabled directory service," says Ed Vaccaro, CIO of consulting firm Booz, Allen & Hamilton. Vaccaro is looking at NDS because Booz Allen is a large NetWare user.
-- Monua Janah
Enterprise Management
Few products have been as anticipated as Computer Associates' Unicenter TNG, which is due to ship early this year. Analysts say this enterprise management product may be worth the wait.
"Unicenter TNG has the potential to significantly alter the competitive landscape," says Rich Ptak, director of systems management research at D.H. Brown Associates Inc., a research firm in Port Chester, N.Y.
Unicenter TNG is much more ambitious than previous iterations of CA's Unicenter line. Based on an object-oriented framework, it's designed to manage many different functions on distributed systems, from PCs to mainframes.
By integrating systems and network management, TNG--like Tivoli Systems' TME 10--will offer users true enterprise management. "TNG and TME 10 really begin to allow top-to-bottom, across-the-board management of distributed computing environments from a singl e site," says Chip Gliedman, an analyst at Giga Information Group, a research firm in Cambridge, Mass.
Users agree. "I can see Unicenter TNG as the glue that can tie together lots of management functions that are occurring around the enterprise," says Steve Rees, computer services director at Tektronix, a Unicenter user in Wilsonville, Ore., that has more than 50 Unix servers and an "uncountable" number of LAN servers around the world. "This will provide more of a single point of monitoring of the entire network," Rees adds.
Asset Management
As enterprise management becomes a reality, tracking all the assets on a network will become increasingly possible--and important. That means asset-management tools, which keep a hardware and software inventory for each network client and server, will be a hot market in 1997. "Asset management will become one of the more critical areas of distributed systems management," says analyst Ptak.
About a dozen vendors offer viable asset management produc ts, from Microsoft with its Systems Management Server software to lesser-known vendors such as CapaCity Software in Berlin, Mass.
All the efforts by suppliers to provide faster networking and better management tools are no guarantee, of course, that users will have it easy. With intranet apps and other bandwidth hogs multiplying so rapidly, users may quickly reach the limits of each new networking technology.
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