What a tangled web we weave, when at first we try to receive … content for a single web page from 150 different content servers. Maybe I am just noticing this more lately, given that the hard drive in my laptop is reaching capacity, but the web is becoming far too fragmented. One central tenet of convergence is that a single network platform can be used for voice, video, and data. 

As the web becomes more multimedia based, that means a single web page might be serving up HTML data from one server, a video advertisement from another, and a VoIP-based customer service chat box from yet another server—not to mention all the other mashed-up content on a typical page today. More...

Over the next decade, the focus of network evaluation will shift toward latency. In the client- server model, connectivity was in the background. In a cloud-based model, connectivity is front and center. This is because a cloud-based model relies on network connectivity as each letter is typed. More...

So last week, in my post called "The Pendulum Swings Toward the Cloud," I talked about how even caches of cloud-based elements could exist in the LAN of the future to cut down on the round-trip time into and out of the cloud. Really, this issue can’t be over-emphasized. I have used the leading Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications over a network, and I don't think many executives appreciate the extent to which latency makes or breaks a SaaS application. More...