Doing Business in Real Time
About this Blog:
The global economy has a life of its own, it lives in real-time, and we are all part of it. Hello brave new world.
Racing toward Global Awareness – the One
Are we creating something new in our planetary evolution?
Cisco and RIM (BlackBerry) have been working on a joint development project that is both freeing us to roam as we please and also tying us all together in ever stronger ways. I spoke with Cisco marketing director Alex Hadden-Boyd who described the project and showed me some of the results which were unveiled last week at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
I normally don’t write about BlackBerry and other gadgets since my fellow CIO blogger Al Sacco already covers them brilliantly in his Mobile WorkHorse blog. But this project got my attention because I’ve been thinking about how companies need to restructure themselves to compete in our global real-time economy and it brought some of my blurry thoughts into sharper focus. I see this project as another step along the way to the creation of what I believe is an emerging planetary cerebral cortex.
Okay, it’s a leap to go from a new BlackBerry application to talking about a planetary cerebral cortex so let me sketch out how I got there. I start by observing that this application is certainly going to be popular and generate more mobile web traffic. Using Cisco's WebEx Connect and this new BlackBerry application, presenters can deliver visuals and do live annotations and markups of the visuals and send text messages to invite people to attend meetings. Attendees can respond to invitations with a single click to log on, they don’t pay to attend, and they can see the visuals and hear the audio just as if they were using their PCs or laptops. Cisco is also working with Nokia and Samsung to provide similar capabilities
One Small Step on the Way to a Giant Leap
I see this application as a small step that leads to many more small steps that result in a "giant leap for mankind" (to paraphrase Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong). It’s one of many small steps driving the incredible growth of global mobile communications. Cisco’s Visual Networking Index Mobile Forecast for 2008-2013, says global mobile traffic will increase 66-fold between 2008 and 2013. It says mobile broadband applications will drive networking trends over the next five years with a powerful momentum deriving from a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 131 percent. Global mobile traffic will exceed two exabytes per month by 2013 (that’s 1 billion gigabytes) and regardless of our present economic troubles, it’s on track to reach one exabyte per month in half the time required by fixed data traffic.
It also says audio communications will be dwarfed by data and video communications; nearly 64 percent of the world's mobile traffic will be video by 2013. That’s a huge change in a very short time. What could all this mean? It’s as if our planet is using us to build out a nervous system that covers the planet and allows for all of us to plug into it.
This is Similar to Human Evolution
This growth of global communications brings to mind an analogy from our own evolution. We humans emerged as the creatures we are today (scientifically referred to as Homo Sapiens) when our cerebral cortex blossomed and grew over the existing structures of our animal brain. In that expansion of the cerebral cortex we awoke and became aware of ourselves. Our planet (affectionately known as Mother Earth) has spawned this whole unruly lot of us, and now she is using us to grow a network over the top of
Previous Post: The IT Bailout of Business [by Enabling Business Agility]Next Post: Hard Times Bring Malicious Obedience [When We Really Need Business Agility]
Most Discussed Posts
Cloud computing has emerged as one of the most significant game changers to hit the technology landscape in the past 20 years. With this massive expansion of the cloud, the perception of the IT organization is shifting from a utility player to a change agent. This eBook breaks down five ways progressive organizations are using cloud-based IT Management solutions to help drive innovation and become more strategic, including: adding visibility and analytics, speeding up time-to-value, lowering costs, improving prioritization, and providing a blueprint for future cloud deployments.
Read the white paper to see how IBM helped Citigroup deliver new services and enhancements to their 200 million customers faster.
There are 3 ways to modernize legacy applications: rewrite completely, acquire packaged solutions or migrate existing code. This paper explains why it's best to migrate and how IBM® Rational® software can help.
Accommodating specific lines of business can result in a hybrid ecosystem of applications and servers. The resulting complexity of this architecture makes for an environment that is costly to maintain and difficult to change when addressing new challenges.
This whitepaper will help you to define a mobile device passcode policy. Security managers must attempt to reconcile two opposing goals. They must: 1) create a passcode policy that is strong enough to protect the device if it is lost or stolen, while: 2) not annoying users with needless length or complexity.
This whitepaper, authored by The Radicati Group, looks at the key reasons organizations should consider moving to a cloud-based archiving solution. Email archiving solutions enable organizations to store, monitor, and collect electronic data exchanged by their users to comply with internal policies and regulations.
ATERNITY will showcase a 30-minute demo on how Fortune 500 companies are leveraging its award-winning FPI Platform to deliver a user-centric approach to Proactive IT Management.
For businesses to move forward and tap into the ever-expanding universe of Internet users and network-enabled devices, it's critical to learn how to make the transition to IPv6. Learn the critical steps your organization must take to make a seamless transition-and keep your business world connected.
Learn how IT teams can protect against spear phishing tactics. Harry Sverdlove, chief technology officer of Bit9 offers a frank discussion about spear phishing - the most common technique used in today's advanced attacks.
Learn how to build a solid business case for your migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux so you can run leaner, innovate faster, be more flexible and own the New Now.
Social media isn't about you; it's about everything around you. As you consider how your customers want to communicate with you, social media is something that can't be ignored. But what should your strategy be? Is social media "just another channel?" What kind of a plan makes sense for your contact center and for your customers? Join our experts as they share their insight and research results.
Hardware tokens were a popular method of strong authentication in past years but the cumbersome provisioning and distribution tasks, high support requirements and replacement costs have limited their growth. The additional log-in steps that hardware tokens require and the resulting user frustrations have limited adoption and make them impractical for larger scale partner and customer applications.
Sponsored Links
