Granted, the economics of a unified communications network have never been in doubt. But corporate inertia, combined with an "if it ain't broke don't fix it" mentality, has killed most convergence projects, with the exception of some greenfield sites where the cost benefits are even clearer. The recent terrorist attacks, however, upset this equilibrium. Applications that take advantage of a converged network, like video conferencing, have suddenly become popular. As has the idea of decentralizing corporate headquarters operations after years of trying to centralize everything. The more greenfield sites and corporate offices there are to link, the more attractive the idea of a converged wide area network (WAN), for example, becomes.

The other driver in the equation is mobile data. The launch of commercial GPRS services in Europe at the end of this year will make many business users comfortable with the idea of a single network for voice and data. More important, it will entice companies to put in place the foundations of a converged infrastructure so that field workers and sales staff are provided with mobile access to enterprise applications. Vendors like Cisco and Commworks, a 3Com company, are ready to pounce on this new opportunity and sell networking products off that foundation. Commworks, for example, is marketing what it calls "softswitch technology." By using software rather than hardware to route all types of traffic, softswitch allows a single network infrastructure to carry any medium—voice, data, fax or video.

10. AUTONOMIC COMPUTING
Hidden Beauty

Unlike all the other technologies covered in this overview, autonomic computing won't be ready for implementation in 2002. But because it neatly encapsulates what all technologies strive for, we've decided to include it in our line-up of top technologies.

Autonomic computing is basically a reaction to the growing complexity of enterprise computing. These days, a computer network is a complex architecture run by thousands of lines of code, which is not only hard to use, but also hard to manage. It's this complexity that "threatens to undermine the very benefits information technology aims to provide", says Paul Horn, senior vice-president of IBM Research, which is backing the concept.

For a way out, autonomic computing has turned to one of the most complex systems of the human body for inspiration—the nervous system. "Consider the autonomic nervous system," Horn says. "It tells your heart how many times to beat and checks your blood's sugar and oxygen levels. But most significantly, it does all this without any conscious recognition or effort." He thinks it is time to design and build computing systems that hide complexity from the user in the same way.

Work is already under way to put flesh on this still fuzzy concept. Current research projects at labs and universities include self-evolving systems that can monitor themselves and adjust to certain changes, "cellular" chips that are capable of recovering from failure, and heterogeneous workload management that balances and adjusts workloads of many applications over various servers.

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