Revisiting the Real-Time Enterprise

By Gregory Ness
May 10, 2005

Article URL: http://www.alwayson-network.com/comments.php?id=10137_0_11_0_C

In 1997, Silicon Valley luminary and marketing guru Regis McKenna published the book Real Time: Preparing for the Age of the Never Satisfied Customer (Harvard Business School Press). While the book was ahead of its time in predicting technology's effect on the marketplace, times have since caught up, and today's businesses operate on a real-time imperative as customers demand immediate access to information and services. In other words, Mr. McKenna's vision has become a reality: In the on-demand world of the present, customers are demanding instant gratification - and the world's leading organizations are turning to transactional data management to survive and thrive.

Recently, I had a chance to speak with Mr. McKenna. In that conversation - which I've excerpted here - the forward-thinking Mr. McKenna ruminated about the state of enterprise data, the concept of the real-time enterprise, and the importance of transactional data management. Part 2 of that conversation will appear in my next column.

How did you become passionate about the real-time enterprise?
Although this wasn't the first time I became aware of living in a real-time world, some years ago when I was on a business trip to Tokyo, I was awakened in the middle of the night by an earthquake tremor. Every Californian wants to know - like they know their cholesterol - the magnitude of any quake they've experienced, so I turned on the TV. Although I don't understand Japanese, I thought the stations would interrupt their programming and I might be able to determine whether I should panic or remain calm. But none of the local stations interrupted their programs! I tuned into a CNN broadcast from Atlanta, and almost immediately it reported that a fair-size quake had hit Tokyo. It struck me that halfway around the world satellite communications were able to compete with local news. Real time is one of those phrases we could all sit around with a bottle of chardonnay after dinner and call up stories about.

If you were to rewrite Real Time in 2005, would you change anything? Plenty! Books written about technology and the marketplace are out of date the day they're published. Until the advent of the internet, IT was focused inside the enterprise. In the space of a few years, the PC and the internet turned corporations inside out. Looking back at that period of time, 1994 to 1995 were seminal years. The internet was privatized in 1994 and adopted on a global scale faster than any previous technology. Netscape launched the Navigator 2 browser and America Online and CompuServe began offering dial-up internet access in 1995. Sun introduced Java that year, and just about every major newspaper and magazine - including the New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, and a host of others - launched websites. One year later, more than 45 million people were using a 100-year-old telephone infrastructure to access the 21st century. Today, more than a billion people have access to the internet.

n the two years straddling the millennium, 100 million miles of fiber were laid around the world - more than enough to reach the sun. The capacity of the internet backbone was doubling every 100 days. The total amount of data created, stored, and accessed was also doubling every 90 days.

The internet was now driven by the marketplace rather than by technology alone. All users needed was a taste of a world of instant access, and they became addicted. The real-time infrastructure was not only making access easier, faster, and cheaper; it was also creating "the never satisfied customer."

It's hard to imagine the real-time compression of the past decade. Think of all the situations that have occurred in just the past few years in which information - or the lack of it - has changed the course of world events: Y2K; the dotcom boom and bust; the missing chads; 9/11; the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; the rise and fall of Enron, WorldCom, and Arthur Anderson; the recent tsunami in South East Asia; and the ascendancy of China and India as high-tech outsourcing regions.

In a very short span of history (about a decade), the entire world has come under the influence of real-time technology. It didn't happen with a bang. It evolved and is still evolving. I wrote Real Time in 1995 and 1996, and it was first published in 1997. (Book publishing isn't real time!) Most corporations were spending money on IT, but they weren't forward-looking enough about coordinating their disparate databases. It was costly and time consuming to compare one database with another, let alone rebuild the enterprise architecture to meet the pressures of competition and the demands of customers. The data wasn't very secure, but demand and growth continued unabated.

We have a lot to do. With a billion people moving into your neighborhood, the opportunities and issues are huge. It's little wonder, then, that viruses, identity theft, and data integration, integrity, and security are major concerns. From a marketing viewpoint, the growth of CRM, web services, open systems, and self-service automation are all about maintaining a competitive edge and keeping it responsive and flexible because we now work and compete in a real time marketplace.

What does the increasing speed of enterprise data collection and distribution mean for the state of the network and the future of networking?
Since 9/11, and with the new emphasis on corporate governance and subsequent legislation such as Sarbanes-Oxley, not only is the speed of data collection and distribution important but the compliance and integrity of the data must be assured as well. EFT is much more scrutinized with added requirements and procedures. Increasingly, business processes are represented in software and a network of services.

The rapid growth of global business activities over the past 20 years and the need for coordination among myriad computing platforms (as well as development, manufacturing, finance, and distribution partners) have become mission-critical issues for every enterprise. Coordinating business processes is the key to productivity and innovation - not to mention just staying ahead of the competition. After the exuberant 1990s and 9/11, IT teams are working harder than ever to cut costs, speed integration, improve productivity, and ensure system reliability and integrity. Sir Francis Bacon's observation that "knowledge is power" is perhaps more appropriate today than ever. We cannot forget that knowledge is derived from a platform of data and information.

Services now comprise more than 75% of the U.S. GDP. For most other industrialized nations, services are 40% to 60%. We've automated all the factories, and now we're automating services. We have to in order to compete. It's evident that everything that can be codified in software will be. If you're traveling, you'll notice an increase in the number of self-check-in kiosks. Rent a car, and all the information has been pre-approved: You'll find your name in lights notifying you where to pick up your car - and you won't have to interact with a single human being. Self-service is nothing new, but supporting and coordinating transactions from thousands or tens of thousands of customer requests per day can only be done efficiently with real-time networks.

Gregory Ness is a senior director of corporate communications at Redline Networks. His career has included stints at companies in networking, VoIP, security, financial services, telecommunications, and consumer products.

[back to In The News] | top of page