Frank Dzubeck

Reading the future through the technology crystal ball can be daunting, especially given past predictions proved false

Over the past couple of years we've seen increased demand for VoIP, most notably in the consumer peer-to-peer market. With Skype leading the way, peer-to-peer VoIP using the Internet has attracted major industry players such as Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and AOL.

The service-oriented-architecture hype of the past year seems to have made believers of the most vocal skeptics. SOA has had an almost mystical aura as the saviour of IT and most stagnant business operations.

Upon reading Cisco CEO John Chambers

Having seen many vendor presentations announcing new products and strategies recently, I

For the past 40 years, networking within the corporate world has evolved in sync with IT. This may or may not change in 2006, depending on whether you believe the vision of Cisco or the IT industry. Computing concepts in the IT industry have evolved over the past four decades from centralized to distributed to client-server to network-based to peer-to-peer to service-oriented.

SONA is fundamentally different from the service-oriented architecture (SOA). It creates a three-layer framework by sandwiching the concept of an interactive services layer between software and networked infrastructure. The architecture concentrates communications intelligence in the network and assumes passive IT software and infrastructure environments.

In the past year we