WSTA Seminar: Future Hot Technologies

Wall Street's IT trade association held a half day seminar on technology trends. We present the highlights.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [November 20, 2006]

Last week the Wall Street Tech Association held a seminar meeting in New York City's Warwick Hotel, Future Hot Technologies, covering areas that are important to business.

Nicholas Lippis, Lippis Enterprises
The first speaker, Nicholas Lippis of Lippis Enterprises, provided an overview of the issues. He said that we can expect more of Moore's Law and Metcalf's Law (sic.).

As users consume more applications, traffic patterns will become less predictable, but bandwidth prices will decline. For example, he said, one Wall Street firm has a 1 Gbps pipe connecting its offices in London and New York. "This enables the company to do things they could never do before. They can shadow data centers across the Atlantic," he claimed.

In a trend Lippis called "appliance consolidation", devices are performing more functions than before.

As more services become network services, the network must never go down, especially when voice is on the IP network. "The data center is now being deployed into the network. We're seeing server blades, redundancy being built into the edge."

Wall Street is paying attention because this trend is worth money on the market. Riverbed's IPO netted nearly a billion dollars earlier this year.

Lippis finished his speech with some predictions for 2010, including:

• Common Gbps links
• Over 50 percent of services to be accessed by mobile phones, as 300 million smartphones ship
• Every laptop to have a bundled smartphone (which will pose a challenge to the cellular telephone industry)
• Number of developers writing APIs, working in XML, javascript, etc., to increase
• The network will reduce human delay in business processes

Vinod Paul, Eze Castle Integration
Vinod Paul, managing director of Eze Castle Integration (ECI), has clearly been focusing on the company's new Business Continuity Service, launched earlier this month [.pdf].

He said that his customers are finding that local events can cause problems and are more frequent than the disasters that make national headlines. "A fire in one building, an HVAC failure, or a local power failure is more likely than a national disaster. One of our clients was in a building where the installation of a new generator took out power for a day. They were able to fail over to their Boston office and use the out of office network until power was restored at the main site."

Another issue for customers is that backup data is portable, and tapes can get lost when they are being couriered from one location to another. Paul recommended encryption at every level.

ECI is a Network Appliance partner and uses NetApp products in its deployments. The company uses NetApp's Decru DataFort FC series to provide encryption, NearStore for backup hardware, and Symantec Veritas NetBackup for backup software.

DataFort allows servers to share keys, so that if the backup in New York is unavailable, the data can be retrieved from London with the same key.

Tom Rowland, Avaya
Tom Rowland, Senior Product Manager at Avaya had just returned from a symposium on Event Processing. He said that Communications-Enabled Business Processes (CEBP) will eliminate human latency and human error.

Essentially, the software has been fed the process, and prompts each person for their input when it is required. The process path must be flexible, but the rewards are great and varied, Rowland claimed.

Rewards include: knowing how your communications resources are used, tracking customer lead and retention, and responding to opportunities faster and with greater efficiency.

Michael Carter, AMX
Michael Carter, Director of Technical Sales at AMX, talked about managing enterprise audio and video resources. This presentation was, much to our surprise, the most interesting to us because it spoke of a trend we had not known about before.

Just as, in the past, the telephone team came to be part of the IT team, so too, some AV teams are now part of IT because conference rooms and presentation equipment are now part of the IT network.

"It's smart building technology," Carter said. It's not just the projector and the phone, either. The lights, the HVAC, the microphone—just about every piece of electrical equipment in a meeting room can be managed from the network.

In large organizations, delays are expensive. "What happens if you bring all of your traders into a meeting room, and there's a 15 minute delay while you get the AV system working," he asked. "What if that delay holds up a meeting that's conducted at the same time worldwide? How expensive is that?"

Similarly, scheduling conflicts can be eliminated with web scheduling for conference rooms. What is the cost of two teams trying to use the same conference room?

In spite of the cost of delays, AV systems are often operated by untrained users.

"This is part of your communications infrastructure," said Carter. "You want to increase reliability, usability, scalability, standardization, extendibility, manageability, and make maintenance and support more efficient."

Savings add up, especially if the organization has, say, 3,000 conference rooms worldwide.

There is a rip and replace sale event, just like VoIP. It's easier to make this sale in a new facility, of course. "Redoing it can be tougher than getting it right the first time," Carter said.

In addition, there are now industry-wide standards. "It's not just that there's incompatibility between products from different vendors. Often, the user experience is completely different too."

Some products use on screen menus for functions that other products have a button for.

"We're a driver-based business. We use drivers to tie the equipment together," Carter said.

The technology changes the sales process. "Contractors are used to selling on a site-by-site basis. Contractors are used to talking to the facilities guys, not the IP guys," said Carter.

So here's our take: if your contact is with the IT group at a large enterprise, you might want to learn about AV systems and add that skill to your own portfolio.

— End