Horst Ellermann is the Chief Editor of the monthly magazine “CIO”, which reports on economic and strategic aspects of IT deployment for managers. His areas of expertise are BI projects and IT in the automotive, logistics and power industries.
External view – 3 theories on the future of the Internet Protocol
Let’s clear up a couple of points at the outset: Classic telephony is currently dying out. Fixed and mobile networks are converging. And more and more machines are talking to machines. In light of these facts, anyone who underestimates the influence of the Internet Protocol is heading for a nasty surprise. The network equipment corporation, Cisco, anticipates that, in the year 2010, 20 American households will generate as much data traffic as the entire Internet in 1995. This growth will have three primary consequences for companies:
1. Employees will expect more moving images
This may sound like an insignificant detail, but it is not: If users can acquire entire feature films or have messages read to them via the Internet Protocol, they will also expect moving images from the companies they work for in the future. A conventional e-mail or a phone call from their superior will no longer motivate them. Technical feasibility is putting corporate contents under pressure: If the CEO can explain via IP TV why he is expecting better sales from whom or how the new change in strategy will look, then he will have to do it. In future, failing to support important messages with images will imply that you do not really mean them (“The medium is the message”).
2. Employees expect data everywhere
Availability works like a drug: In future, anyone sitting in a home office or traveling as a sales representative will assume that he/she will receive the same information at the same speed as all his/her other colleagues. “Need for speed” is being given a whole new meaning. Anyone traveling from Munich to Frankfurt will dispense with the plane because he/she can access the Internet continuously in the three hours and fourteen minutes on the ICE train. Hotspots will no longer be isolated areas.
3. IP will stand for Intellectual Property
The Internet Protocol is becoming omnipresent. Images, voice or other data packages will be sent via IP as naturally as electricity is distributed as alternating voltage at 240 V. In other words, only technicians will continue to use the abbreviation IP in this sense. Everyone else will use IP to mean “intellectual property”, because that is the actual challenge for companies in the Internet age: How can they protect their intellectual property in a networked world where part of the eastern hemisphere regards copying as an art form and for paying homage?
