7 March 2007
DON SAMBANDARAKSA
Cisco is putting intelligence in the network today in a way that will lay the foundations for a quadplay network that will be able to handle data, voice, video and services, according to Christopher Khang, Cisco vice president for Asia.
Speaking in an exclusive interview on a visit to Bangkok, Khang explained that far from being an abstract vision, Cisco today has a number of solutions that take the load off application logic and put it into the network.
One offering from its data centre business unit is a virtualisation technology that matches processing needs with computing resources, wherever they may be.
For example, a brokerage firm may want to run its payroll systems on the same grid that does share processing.
"If we have a request from payroll to pay this employee's salary, and another from an investor wanting to sell 100 million shares of stock, of course, the stock transaction will be more important to the salary," Khang explained.
"With this technology, the line between what is the network and what is the application will be blurred. The network intelligence will know where the resources are, what are their levels of utilisation, where the service is coming from and match them together. Basically it's grid computing combined with on-demand computing," he said.
In the past, the networks have been about connecting people to people and organisations to organisations, but today, the network is critical infrastructure for customers and interact in the way they want.
"With blogs, new web sites, transactions and video clips, the Internet today is all created by end users and fuelled by demand from end users. It is no longer the companies dictating. We need to be sure the network will provide the experience of life on the web," Khang said in a rather visionary if abstract manner.
Khang pointed out that Cisco today had risen to the challenge with its unified communicator, which brings together voice mail, instant messaging, Outlook scheduling and email.
With it, you can know you have new voicemail through the same interface you check for new email.
"The only way we can integrate is based on Internet Protocol (IP)," he said.
Another Cisco appliance (their term for a software and hardware solution) is Telepresence, a high-definition teleconferencing solution that shows participants on life-size monitors with enough fidelity to know when one is making eye contact.
He explained that it is quite unlike HP's Halo solution, as Telepresence is part of its unified communications solution and is based on a standard IP network.
"Cisco is a strong advocate of open standards. Any device that can interact with IP can interact with this," he said.
Cisco Thailand country manager and director for Indochina, Vorkorn Patra-Yanan, explained that despite slow Internet speeds in the country, Cisco's advanced engineering is relevant and, indeed, needed here. For instance, rather than pushing the envelope by running at high speeds, many installations are far more hot, humid and dusty than in "developed" countries with higher broadband throughput, thus requiring much higher quality.
Nor it is not always about data. Seven years ago, Cisco implemented TOT's 1234 cheap voice over IP telephony solution. "We had network utilisation of up to 90 percent, which was pretty scary," he said. Khang, on the other hand, said that the lack of infrastructure in Thailand could be viewed as an opportunity to leapfrog other countries with new technologies, as long as the government has a vision.
