"An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered. "

--G. K. Chesterton (1874 - 1936)

The computing infrastructure landscape has experienced a large change in the past few years of its evolution. With user needs growing fast and becoming more complex, the hardware, software and network spectrum has changed likewise. Much of it has become possible due to advances in the Internet access and network infrastructure as also the applications that have helped organizations and individuals globally access information from anywhere other than their offices and collaborate and coordinate with their colleagues.

The current article deals with the changing landscape of internetworking technologies and the software and hardware infrastructure that enable individuals and businesses to carry work tasks effectively from their different office locations or even from their homes.  

Applications:

Today organizations around the world are busy devising new and effective ways to do business and service customers. Technological advancements play a crucial role in these efforts. In the case of doing business from multiple locations, companies have come up with ideas and ways to work where technology helps businesses to save  costs and remain in the competitive landscape.

Three areas that come to mind that either have had or are on the verge of having enormous growth due to technology advancement are: 

Collaboration :

Many a times, executives in companies need to work together with other employees who necessarily may not be in the same office... or even in the same country.   This happens in product design and development or during sales efforts where help is required from colleagues situated in a different location. At such times, teams working on a single project collaborate and work together to accomplish the task at hand. Collaboration saves on organization's time and costs and speed up the process. Collaboration may involve real time to near real time activity. So a sales executive may be helped by a product design engineer to create a technical fact sheet over the company's collaboration software – which could be a simple chat program or even a white board application.  

Telecommuting and conferencing :

In the recent spate of cut throat competition, companies are looking for ways to streamline operations and save costs. Telecommuting is proving to be an effective way to do this. Telecommuting – working from home has sprung lot of opportunities and more and more companies are trying it. Conferencing facilities – another time and costs saving idea has also progressed from teleconference to videoconferencing leveraging the existing technology. Especially after 9/11 companies the world over cut their travel and office occupancy rates drastically as a knee jerk reaction and many continue to maintain the situation as they have begun to see the benefits in the current scope of things. 

Online learning :

An upcoming trend that is taking root in the training industry is the online/ distance learning. Routed as the next best thing on the Internet by many pundits and analysts,  online learning is receiving a lot of attention from corporates and individuals alike.  

Hardware & software requirements:

Simultaneous to the advent and somewhat proliferation of ideas, the computer industry has improved on the kind of infrastructure that is dished out to the world. Most of the applications under the above categories require a modem or Internet access through a network card. For conferencing exercise the users need to have video cameras attached to their workstations. Online learning requires multimedia hardware (CDROM, speakers and microphones in some cases) installed on the machines as many education programs are written in multimedia.  

While the hardware requirements on the above services remain more or less similar, there has been quite an activity on the software front. Various applications have sprung up for each of the above services. Collaboration software like Groove are web based software that companies use to manage work groups or teams working in different areas or locations. Corporate Intranets also are used by organizations to collaborate on differently located teams on projects .  White board applications are now a common feature in officeware suites like the ones provided by Microsoft or Lotus. Besides this there are many custom made software and also OGL (open general license) software that are available for no charge that small companies use to save costs. Many versions of these software also include transmitting critical alerts and short data messages to the PDAs and wireless devices of executives making pathway for a wireless revolution.
 

Networks:

There was a time of dial up connections and 56K modems where the download speeds were low and the applications that ran were severely limited in functionality because of low speeds. Then came broadband. Internet at high speed access opened up limitless opportunities for building services and applications that could provide useful content over the Internet. Businesses as always were the first to adopt the technology and use for their benefit. Broadband by definition are networks that provide as much or more than 200kbps of speeds. The 3 broadband technologies in prominence today are Cable, DSL and Satellite. Each enjoys a dedicated business as well as residential audience.  

Technically DSL provides a dedicated service over a single telephone line; cable modems offer a dedicated service over a shared media while a satellite connection transmits data through satellite links. . While cable modems have greater downstream bandwidth capabilities (up to 30 Mbps), that bandwidth is shared among all users on a line. Therefore speeds vary as more users in a neighborhood get online at the same time. Cable modem upstream traffic may be slower at times than DSL because high neighborhood traffic on the line can cause rate reductions. DSL technology provides speeds up to 8 Mbps downstream and up to 1 Mbps upstream, depending upon line length and loop and line conditions while broadband satellite technology, can deliver data at speeds up to 400 Kbps. However, the service may suffer from heavy interference in dense and crowded urban areas.     

Distant offerings of services is a growing industry. With companies looking for reductions in cost overheads, and capturing more markets, servicing customers off the web provides a formidable option to organizations globally.

your comments on the article

contact the author

Share this newsletter!
If you know colleagues who would be interested in this newsletter, please direct them to http://www.webizus.com/newsletter.html

To unsubscribe from the monthly newsletter, click on the link below to e-mail your request to us. YOU WILL RECEIVE NO FURTHER NEWSLETTERS from Webizus Technologies if you do.
newsletter@webizus.com?subject=unsubscribe

Webizus takes your privacy seriously. To learn more about Webizus' use of personal information, please read our Privacy Policy at http://www.webizus.com/privacy.html

Disclaimer:
Webizus through the content published makes no warranties or guarantees about the products/ services represented or about the articles presented in the newsletter. The articles by various authors are entirely their own opinion. Webizus holds no responsibility to any damage or loss incurred in any form to any person or organization due to the publication of any of the issues.

Copyright ©1999-2002, Webizus Technologies, All Rights Reserved.

For more information mail us on info@webizus.com

Contact us today for a demonstration of how we can cut down your costs and improve your business:
Email us at: info@webizus.com or call us at +91-9821634476 / +91-22-55910132

Download our corporate profile