Tan Ee Sze

Industry veterans are confident that despite being buffeted by two big storms in the past 10 years, Singapore's IT sector will bounce back. The more interesting bets, however, are on how this will happen.

Wide area network (WAN) compression and optimization technology companies are setting up a presence in the Asia Pacific to capitalize on opportunities presented by the growing deployment of IP telephony and other bandwidth intensive enterprise applications in the region.

Plans to establish high-speed bandwidth-on-demand connections between public service LANs in Singapore and New Zealand were set in motion recently with the signing of a memorandum of understanding (MOU) by 1-Net Singapore Pte. Ltd. and New Zealand consortium First Light.

The Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) is working with Intel Corp. to harmonize standards that will support single authentication, single billing and seamless connectivity across diverse data communication networks including wireless LANs, wireless WANs and fixed WANs.

A new Ethernet-based network storage protocol, designed for the transfer of SCSI (small computer system interface) data and commands over networks, is being positioned as a lower-cost alternative for localized storage area network (SAN) implementations.

Singapore is gunning for the US$55 billion embedded software market with plans by the Economic Development Board to position the country as a global centre of excellence for embedded software technology.

The XML (extensible markup language) revolution will be as important as the advent of the Internet itself in terms of its impact on the computing environment. And Microsoft Corp. is underscoring this point by investing US$5.5 billion in research and development this financial year, mainly in the seven software businesses built around its XML platform .Net.

Islands of next generation Internet protocol (IP) IPv6 will emerge within the next two to three years with the deployment of 3G networks, said Bob Brace, vice-president of Nokia Corp.