Packet™ Magazine Archives, Fourth Quarter 1998 Broadcast Address By Bruce Nelson, Chief Science Officer Latitude: Networkers. Longitude: Networkers. Destination: Technical summits. You, Cisco's global technical customers, are always looking for greater technical depth and understanding -- and Cisco is responding on almost every continent with this year's nine Networkers events. These conferences bring you the best of Cisco's engineering talent, including a few of our stars -- the Cisco Fellows and Distinguished Engineers. Now we've brought some of this engineering talent and the most popular topics at Networkers to this issue of Packet™ magazine. The emphasis on Layer 3 enterprise topics in these "Best of Networkers" articles confirms the challenging nature of your environments, both in campus switching complexity and WAN traffic tuning and control. Cisco's development engineering teams are always pushing the technology envelope to deliver the functions you've told us that you need to meet future application requirements. In doing so, they often set de facto standards like the Cisco Group Multicast Protocol (CGMP) or Tag Switching (now taking shape as the IETF's Multiprotocol Label Switching -- or MPLS -- standard). With the explosive growth of IP, Cisco engineers must constantly balance your needs for function, performance, manageability, and reliability against breakneck schedules and sometimes subtly different international requirements. At Networkers, the entire on-hand Cisco team -- from executives like John Chambers and me, to the development engineers behind the new technologies -- is there to hear from you on how we're performing. Remember, Networkers is your forum -- it's not only an opportunity to learn from us, but to tell us how to improve -- and there's always opportunity for improvement in the Internet revolution! During the conferences I personally enjoy observing the furious white board activity in the design clinics. Staffed by both headquarters and field engineering talent, these clinics are your chance to implement a few of those new ideas from your Networkers sessions at the white board and get an instant design review. What's hot beyond Networkers, on what Cisco calls the "radar screen"? The voice/data convergence process has only begun. Today's enterprise-prototyping of multiservice voice, video, and data is so successful that even the largest carriers -- like Sprint with its new ION services -- are driving hard-to-replace traditional TDM networks with packet-based backbones and new wave call-processing capabilities. Cisco will remain active at the forefront of this evolution with your constructive feedback and our hardcore engineering. What's even farther out on the radar screen? For me, it's Mobile IP. New, digital, wireless, packet-based IP networks, giving those next-generation slimline PCs and "wireless IP palmtops" real roving capability with instant, modemless IP dial tone, e-mail, and Web access -- which I find more useful than a mobile phone. You could do it today with several devices and a cable, but I look forward to more ease, integration, and ubiquity before Mobile IP really rockets. Speaking of rockets, you've asked for more technical articles in Packet, and now it's time to hear from a few of Cisco's own stars. Enjoy the articles and tell us what you think. And if you crave more, also check out Cisco's new Internet Protocol Journal . Bruce Nelson Chief Science Officer Table of Contents Posted: Thu Feb 4 17:04:18 PST 1999 Copyright © 1998 Cisco Systems, Inc.