Advertisment

When Network Tools Get Biz-Savvy

author-image
DQI Bureau
New Update

It

won’t amaze you any more that the letter e can change the strategies and

fortunes of infotech companies. But it does make people sit up and ask: Can

every company on the planet be an Internet company? Microsoft, IBM, Sun, Oracle

reinvent themselves around the ‘e’, the dot in dotcom. Upstart dotcoms buy

out brick-and-mortar giants. AOL swallows Time-Warner.

Advertisment

Some IT companies make building blocks, and of

them, a few make the Internet’s building blocks. Microsoft and Intel have

ruled desktops. Sun servers still run quite a bit of the Internet, and till

recently the Net’s top-level dotcom nameserver ran on a Sun (now it’s on an

IBM). Cisco, which builds key components for the backbone of the Net, overtook

Microsoft last month as the world’s most valuable company. End desktop era,

begin network era.

Take Computer Associates, which I once knew of

only for its CA-Clipper compiler. It brought in network utilities, then

management tools. These evolved into the Unicenter TNG network management suite,

which grew up to handle enterprise systems management. At CA World in New

Orleans last month, CA showcased TNG as a business resource management

framework–business of course prefixed with an e. To manage networks on

a grand scale, with consumer or mobile devices from handhelds and PDAs to

modules in police cars. With its Interbiz and Jasmine ii platform, this ‘network

plumbing’ company is turning into an ebiz enabling company. This includes ASP

joint ventures–in India, too, later this month.

CA made ‘neural network agents’ to sniff past

data and predict future network trouble. In Unicenter, it tackles network

glitches. Applied to business problems, it’s a much bigger deal. A Neugent

could digest credit card transactions and fraudulent data, and then predict the

probability of a specific live transaction being fraudulent–catching fraud on

the fly.

Advertisment

As I pointed out last month when commenting on

Cisco’s rise, the Net-age IT rulers won’t be the ones with the biggest chunk

of the PC desktop, nor those with the biggest dotcom ads. They’ll be the ones

who have integrated inseparably with Internet technology and business. The

network is the computer, and the base of the e-conomy. A few, such as Cisco and

CA, have been working quietly on the backbone of that network. You may not have

consumers seeing their ‘Where do you want to go today?’ billboards, but they’ll

be there.

IT e-conomy 101: To survive, you adapt to the net

age. To rule, you lead the net age. You find your place in the ebiz ecology,

leverage and adapt your strengths to the Web, and help define the direction of

the Net age.

pkr@cmil.com 

Advertisment