As 2025 kicked off, I wrote a column about the network vendor landscape – specifically, which networking players will step up and put their efforts into finding new applications with solid business benefits that could enable a network transformation. I said there are two transformational applications that could drive the gains in IT spending everyone would like to see. For vendors, that would mean more profits. For enterprises, it would mean more new and exciting applications, skills to develop, technologies to exploit. What stands in the way? Benefits, a business case, return on investment.
The first of those two applications is one that could lead us to an exciting future in networking and IT. It has a critical advantage in that it’s an extension of a benefit we know.
Most IT benefits come down to empowering workers. To increase benefits, we need to either further enhance the productivity of those we already target…or target people we’ve missed. Look around your office; do you see many workers not using technology? So, we don’t have any missed workers, right? Wrong. You’re looking in the wrong place. The office, where we’ve targeted IT for half a century or more, accounts for only 60% of the workforce, and only 58% of labor costs. The remainder is out in the world, wandering around and doing stuff that actually drives commercial activity, rather than sitting at desks managing the results, desks where we can easily reach them. If we could empower the missing here, we could justify an explosion in IT that would dwarf the past periods of IT growth.
The basic challenge in empowering our missing 40% is lack of information about them, and how they’re working. These workers aren’t analyzing sales or managing inventory, they’re driving trucks, pushing boxes, and turning valves. Where they are and what they’re doing is almost a complete mystery, at least as far as IT goes. OK, we know our worker is somewhere in our plant, but where and doing what, exactly? What are the conditions the worker is dealing with? What do they need to do their job more efficiently? If they’re in the real world, then it’s the real world that we need to understand, which means we need a lot of IoT out there to feed us information, and a lot of processing power to analyze the flood of data that would result. In theory, almost any IT player could take hold of this problem, but two already seem to have set their sights on this source of new IT and network benefits, and each seems to be focusing on one of these needs.
Ericsson is best known for its role in telecom infrastructure, but it recently did a webinar on…IoT. In it, it featured a partner who supplied middleware to handle IoT events, one who had developed a special network protocol to exchange event information, and another who specialized in secure and efficient connection of IoT devices over low-bandwidth connections. The goal of this combination was to enable widespread IoT sensor deployment to bring knowledge of real-world conditions into applications, which would then support the productivity of that 40% out-in-the-wild worker population.
The Ericsson webinar describes the essential features our empowerment of the missing demands, but not applications that actually reach them. For those, developer and integrator partners are needed. Candidates for that role, it seems to me, are in fact the target of the webinar. How far Ericsson is willing to go to promote applications is impossible to know at this point, and how much encouragement developers or integrators might need is also unknown. The good news is that Ericsson has provided a step in all the critical directions, from getting the needed information to the basic structure of applications that could convert that data into benefits.
Nokia seems to have the same goal, but it is taking a different route to reach it. Rather than trying to assemble the ingredients of the kind of IoT needed for empowerment, they start with a recipe—the digital twin.
Digital twins are computer models of real-world systems, designed to assemble the state of the pieces of a complex process into an understanding of the process as a whole. IoT feeds the model, and the model’s logic allows what would otherwise be a bunch of disconnected data parameters to be seen in context of the mission overall. It’s not an application, but an application architecture or model. As someone with long experience in software architecture and IoT, I can say that Nokia’s digital twin would be an easier starting point for a developer partner. But Nokia, like Ericsson, seems reluctant to make the connection to the missing 40%.
Why such a delay? Nothing is missing here. IoT gives us the ability to quantify the real world. Video and AI analysis gives us the ability to give applications a window into the most powerful human sense, vision, to see what workers are doing. AR/VR glasses can use that same visual sense to direct work behavior, providing information and even guiding movements. Yes, the challenges of being part of work itself are greater than measuring the results of work or planning how to direct it, but can you think of a piece of the challenge we can’t meet? I can’t, so perhaps we need a different kind of vision, a holistic vision of the future of work itself.
What’s different about empowerment today? It’s not just the target, it’s the relationship between technology and empowerment. Cisco’s network dominance started with a single network card for a Digital Equipment Corp. minicomputer, which filled the need for an open, multi-vendor, approach to networking as the number of computer vendors exploded. Today, we have AI, digital twins, IoT, AR/VR, robots, and a bunch of other things already waiting to be exploited, but doing that will demand a unifying concept or model to link them to our missing 40%. Think of the challenge as doing a jigsaw puzzle. It’s easy when one piece remains, but not so when whole blocks of pieces are still mixed on the table. Who, among all our vendors, thinks they can put them all in place? Who’s willing to try? Who will win?
The one who sings best, probably. More than anything else, what our tech world needs is broad interest. Tangibly, that builds support for transformational projects within enterprises. Intangibly, it builds buzz or hype that promotes vendors with prospective buyers and with Wall Street. Ericsson and Nokia are taking very different paths toward our missing 40%, but it’s going to come down to the one that tells the best story, that excites the market with the potential. Since neither company is known for its ability to move PR mountains, that may be the biggest challenge they, and we, face.
But let’s go back to our jigsaw puzzle. Yes, realizing the common theme to link the pieces still missing could accelerate progress, but one piece at a time still works. At some point, what requires a vision of the future requires only a process of fitting tools to gaps. If neither Ericsson nor Nokia can see the future today, can someone else? If not, we’ll still get to the future anyway.
In past waves of IT advancement, it took about seven years to take each step. Even though this empowerment step is much bigger, I don’t think it’s going to take that long this time. We are very close here, close to opening a business case for networking and IT bigger than any single one we’ve ever had. It took us almost seventy years to build up to the empowerment of the easy 60%, but we’ve got almost all we need to get the missing 40% already in place. Imagine the impact of a business case even bigger than the one that’s driven seventy years of IT and network evolution, concentrated into a few years. Could that happen, starting in 2025? It could, and there may be an even bigger revolution on tap to follow it, one I’ll talk about next time.