Mobile Internet will change the way people work
The next stage of the Internet is the widespread mobilization of broadband access. Once that happens, it will have a profound impact on many industries, businesses, and workers. It will change data consumption habits, business processes, communications infrastructures, and much more. We will begin to see more isolated pockets of these types of changes later this spring in the United States, with Sprint’s rollout of mobile WiMAX in the Chicago and Washington D.C. areas.
Mobile WiMAX will spread to many other U.S. and international cities over the next 24-36 months on its journey to critical mass, and then it will be confronted by competition from LTE and other mobile broadband technologies. However, in the United States, the next stage of the Internet begins in 2008. If you want to see the future in action today, go to Seoul, South Korea, where an alternative form of mobile WiMAX called WiBro has already been deployed.
Unified communications will unlock the business value of VoIP
While lots of companies have deployed VoIP in recent years, the true business value and productivity benefits of those systems won’t be fully unlocked until unified communications is deployed on top of VoIP. UC uses software as the glue that allows workers to connect multiple messaging and productivity systems, including e-mail, phone, instant messaging, calendaring, phone conferencing, and video conferencing. Combining all of these functions with integrated presence information can then open the door to more efficient communication between workers and help tame the chaos that is currently causing workers to have to manage up to five different systems to get their messages.
Utility computing will start a new wave of IT outsourcing
Utility computing involves using virtualization to build a data center with a new level of flexibility, scalability, and manageability. Utility computing could allow a company to deploy an entirely new data center within 24 hours. It would allow IT to scale up and scale down server resources on the fly.
For example, you might scale up the number of domain login servers during business hours (when logins are heaviest) and then scale them down at night and scale up data synchronization servers to run during non-business hours. This type of utility computing will turn IT infrastructure and operations into a commodity and will drive costs down as companies outsource their data centers to utility computing vendors. This will run the gamut from full service outsourcing to simple colo arrangements. If you want a sneak peak at what this could look like, check out 3Tera.
