Original SunWorld Online Page[1]
A pumped vision of the Intranet
3Com CTO tells TCP/IP Expo users `You'll need to put your network on
steroids'
San Jose -- In a keynote address today at TCP/IP+Intranet Expo, John
Hart, vice president and CTO of 3Com Corp., told a crowd of several
hundred that to build intranets of the future, "you'll need to put your
network on steroids."
While it's important to focus on the kinds of services an intranet can
offer, users can't forget that behind the services is a hardware
network, or the "plumbing" that makes it all work, Hart said. "No one
cares about a network until it breaks," Hart said, who prefers to call
intranets "web-nets."
Intranet users today and in the future will want high-end applications,
such as two-way videoconferencing and multimedia, according to Hart.
These types of services are parallel to the kinds of services users get
on the World Wide Web, said Hart, but aren't secure and fast enough
right now to be useful to companies.
"In contrast, the requirements for a company's intranet network
infrastructure are usually dramatically different from those of the
Internet in areas such as topology, bandwidth, latency, security and
ownership costs," Hart said. Intranets of the future will diverge from
Internet technologies in order to take advantage of new networking
technologies, such as beefed-up routers and high-security firewalls,
which can deliver fast and secure high-end applications, he said.
Hart called these new intranets "3D intranets," referring to their
multi-tiered levels of services in the realms of order entry,
procurement, electronic commerce, customer interaction, whiteboard
collaboration, real-time monitoring and high security. These TCP/IP
networks will run on large "infrastructure servers" and use heavy-duty
routers with embedded firewalls and multiple switches, Hart said.
"I believe all networks will run on TCP/IP in the next several years,"
Hart said. "3Com will stay on top because we sell our products to
Internet service providers (ISPs). -- By Kristi Essick IDG News Service
San Francisco Bureau
Resources:
* TCP/IP+Intranet Expo Conference and Exposition[2]
http://www.cardinal.com/tcpip/
* 3Com[3] http://www.3com.com/
* "What the `Intranet' really means"[4] , a Connectivity column in the
July 1996 SunWorld Online
http://www.sun.com/sunworldonline/swol-07-1996/swol-07-connectivity.html
* "Spinning the internal Web"[5] , a SunWorld Online feature story
http://www.sun.com/sunworldonline/swol-04-1996/swol-04-intranet.html
* "Preventing intranet chaos"[6] sidebar to the above story
http://www.sun.com/sunworldonline/swol-04-1996/swol-04-intranet.html#sidebar1
* NetscapeWorld[7] Web-based magazine http://www.netscapeworld.com/
* Internet & Java Advisor[8] http://www.advisor.com/ia.htm
* The Intranet Journal[9] http://www.brill.com/intranet
* Netscape Intranet white papers[10]
http://www.netscape.com/comprod/at_work/white_paper/index.html
* Netscape's Creating Net sites
http://www.netscape.com/assist/net_sites/index.html
* "How Sun uses the Internet"[11] , a feature story on Sun's Web page
http://www.sun.com:80/960101/feature1/index.html
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[1] http://www.sun.com/sunworldonline/swol-08-1996/swol-08-tcp.html
[2] http://www.cardinal.com/tcpip/
[3] http://www.3com.com/
[4] /sunworldonline/swol-07-1996/swol-07-connectivity.html
[5] /sunworldonline/swol-04-1996/swol-04-intranet.html
[6] /sunworldonline/swol-04-1996/swol-04-intranet.html#sidebar1
[7] http://www.netscapeworld.com/
[8] http://www.advisor.com/ia.htm
[9] http://www.brill.com/intranet
[10] http://www.netscape.com/comprod/at_work/white_paper/index.html
[11] /960101/feature1/index.html