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Beyond ICT: Embracing the Next Digital Revolution
SHENZHEN, China, Dec. 31, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- The history of human social development is, to some extent, the history of human scientific and technological progress. Humanity achieves scientific and technological progress by pushing its physical and mental limits and breaking away from the restrictions of time and space. This has been true in times both ancient and modern. Our ancestors built beacon towers and invented the wheel, while we have ubiquitous Internet connection and vehicles capable of reaching outer space. In the course of our scientific and technological development, two epoch-making inventions have been the steam engine and the computer. The steam engine ushered in the industrial age by providing far more power than what manual labor and beasts of burden could generate. The computer brought us into the information age through data processing capabilities that far outperform the human brain.
The past century has witnessed several waves of progress made possible by information technologies, including those used for communications (telegraphy, telephony, and broadcasting), home entertainment (radio, TV), computing, and the Internet. Information technologies drive economic growth worldwide and reshape the way people live and work. At present, we are evolving from a "society on wheels" to a "society on the network." However, information systems are still regarded as aid tools and support systems, keeping the digital and physical worlds somewhat parallel and compartmentalized. Now, as the digital and physical worlds begin to merge, the development of the Internet of Things has proven to be an effective catalyst of information-based developments and is sure to bring groundbreaking changes to all of humanity.
1. Beyond information and communications, the increasing integration of the digital and physical worlds will lead to a new digital revolution.
British philosopher Karl R. Popper divides human society into three parts: the physical world, the mental/psychological world, and the world of products of the human mind (also known as the world of objective knowledge). In the future, the physical world will be married with the digital world to form a new world. This integration will bring tremendous changes to the way we live and work, the way businesses operate, and the way society functions -- a new age of digital citizens, digital enterprises, and digital society.
-- Heavy reliance on networks will usher in an age of digital citizenry.
Nowadays, the ways in which people communicate, acquire information,
study, have fun, shop, make friends, and pair-bond are quite different
from what we saw just two decades ago. People not only have more means
to stay connected and obtain information, but have exceeded the
constraints of their physical location or time zone. With the
developments in this short time span, rather than waiting days or even
months for letters to arrive, people now contact others in real time via
email, instant messaging, and social networking. Likewise, people can
read the news online anytime, anywhere, rather than clinging to their
TVs or radios. Wikipedia and other interactive platforms allow people to
easily find answers to their questions, without having to wade through
voluminous encyclopedias or wait for office hour-working librarians.
Internet users exceeded 2.4 billion in 2012, over 34% of the world's
population, with this figure growing roughly 8% each year. There are
also as many as 1.1 billion smartphone subscribers right now, an
increase of 42% over 2011. However, this is just the beginning. As
digital lifestyles are adopted, digital citizenry will shape the
behaviors of next-gen consumers, changing the way people live, and
shaking up numerous industries. For example, traditional video sales and
rental stores are disappearing, and the 244-year old Encyclopedia
Britannica is no longer printed. It is very likely that in the next few
decades, children will ask why the word newspaper contains the word
paper in much the same way as our children today ask why the media is
still referred to as the press.
-- The age of digital business is drawing near, as seen by our commercial
dependence on networks for production and operations. Network
developments have significant influence on business activities. Which
business today can even continue to operate if its network fails?
E-commerce is booming and extending its reach into every consumer buying
decision, whether involving digital content (e-books and digital music),
cars, or home appliances, or even small items like snacks and slippers.
In 2012 alone, electronic retail sales worldwide totaled US$1.1
trillion. Information technologies will be further applied to enterprise
production and operations. Rather than being tools or support
components, ICT will become integral to production, decision-making,
customer relationship management, service provisioning, marketing, and
logistics. ICT will be employed in the building of end-to-end systems
that work in real time, playing a role in each and every link, from idea
generation to product conceptualization to precision marketing to
efficient operations to on-time delivery. In other words, digitization
will become a key characteristic of the future enterprise.
-- A borderless Internet gives rise to a digital society. Thanks to the
boundary-free nature of the Internet, a large number of borderless
virtual communities and societies have come into being. A plethora of
these communities will combine to form a digital society that transcends
borders, cultures, and races. Facebook is home to over one billion users
(or netizens), making it the third largest "citizenry" in the world.
This type of digital society, which mirrors while extending beyond the
physical world, will undoubtedly impact many aspects of social
administration and transformation, including politics, economy, law,
culture, news & media, security, and ethics, among others.
As a communications tool and support system, information technologies have significantly changed the way in which people live and work over the past few decades. They also spawn new economies and industries while reshuffling traditional ones. No doubt, the increasing integration of the physical and digital worlds will have a more tremendous impact on society. Such integration will direct ICT development in a way that can better serve society.
2. Smart infrastructure presents opportunities for further ICT development.
Technologically-speaking, ICT innovations mainly fall into five groups: mobility, broadband interconnectivity, social networking, cloud computing, and big data processing. The objective of these innovations is to transform the physical world into a smart world underpinned by smart ICT infrastructure, making the latter key to advancing information-based development.
-- From big data to "big" wisdom, the IT systems of carriers and
enterprises are evolving from post-processing support systems to
real-time business systems. This transition marks a fundamental change
in how IT functions. We are living in what may be the "big bang" of
information. In 2012, up to 2.4 zettabytes of data (that's 2.4 billion
terabytes) was generated globally; it would take as many as three
trillion DVDs to store all this data. By 2020, the amount of data
generated is expected to grow fourteen-fold. This data will have two
major sources. The first is from the huge amount of transactions between
enterprises and between enterprises and consumers. The second is from
countless interactions on the Internet, social networks, enterprise
service networks, and the Internet of Things. Social networking will be
particularly pervasive; it will be emblematic of all applications, not
just for social networking utilities like Facebook. Typically, big data
has four characteristics: variety, volume, velocity, and value. Velocity
and value are most important. By combining the analytical capabilities
of the human brain to determine behavioral patterns and the data
processing capabilities of computers, we can quickly analyze big data
and leverage digital assets to develop valuable diagrams that show
relationships, intentions, consumption patterns, interests, and
mobility. From big data to "big" wisdom, IT systems will be capable of
understanding not only the present preferences of customers but also
their future tendencies. This will make social administration, corporate
decision-making, and individual lifestyles smarter and more logical.
Therefore, IT systems for both enterprises and carriers shall no longer
function as post-processing support systems. Rather, they will become
real-time business systems that facilitate business operations, a
transition that marks a fundamental change in IT.
-- As traditional IT enterprise architecture is no longer capable of
processing the huge volumes of data being encountered, an
Internet-oriented cloud computing architecture is needed. The rebuilding
of data centers will prove the basis of supporting big data. Over the
past two decades, most enterprises have applied client-server
architecture for their IT. Although these systems were constantly
upgraded, their technical architecture was not, making each upgrade
repetitive and not transformative. With client-server, the server
primarily stores small volumes of enterprise transaction data, leaving
most data scattered across employee PCs (clients). As Internet
technologies have continued to develop, data has begun its migration
from the PC to the cloud, causing a sharp spike in data volume for the
latter. The need to store such vast volumes is exactly what is driving
innovations in computing and storage architectures, and giving rise to
the emergence of cloud computing architectures that feature
virtualization, parallel computing, distributed storage, and automation,
making for a dramatic change over the traditional architectures. In
fact, this new push is considered the third major wave of IT
transformation after those related to the mainframe and client/server
architecture. Presently, traditional enterprise IT architectures are no
longer capable of processing the voluminous amounts of data that they
take in. To answer this need, an Internet-oriented cloud computing
architecture is required. This architecture will form the basis of both
big data and "big" wisdom.
-- Low-bandwidth networks are hindering information-based development and
user experience improvement. A ubiquitous Gigabit network is a
prerequisite for any digital society. To lay the foundation for a
Terabit-network society, next-gen research is needed. As public and
private clouds develop, the amount of data they carry is sure to
mushroom, as the analysis of data is more effective when its storage is
centralized. To drive this migration, ubiquitous networking with greater
bandwidth is required to support data upload and data usage. Ubiquitous
broadband makes cloud computing accessible. Devices across the entire
industry chain, including content creation devices (video cameras),
cloud computing devices that process information, and terminals where
information is generated and consumed (PCs, tablets, etc.) all now
support high-definition video, even smartphones that cost only US$150.
However, the global network, which has an average bandwidth of only
3.1Mbps, is still unable to support high-definition video, leading to
the aforementioned hindrances to user experience. Therefore, we must
accelerate the construction of Gigabit networks to enable seamless
ultra-broadband access, the basis for building a digital society. We
must also intensify our research into and innovation efforts for
technologies such as next-generation mobile access, next-generation
digital subscriber line (DSL) access, passive optical network (PON)
access, next-generation Internet, and all-optical networking (AON). This
focus on future networks will lay a solid foundation for building a
Terabit-network society.
-- To support evolution from a "hard" pipe to a "soft" pipe, we should
develop programmable, scalable, application-agile, automatic, and open
intelligent networks. Software-defined networking (SDN) will lead to the
development of next-gen network architectures. Technologies are enablers
of network development. In the past two decades, driven by advancements
of technologies from time-division multiplexing (TDM) towards all-IP,
networks have undergone three different revolutions: analog to digital,
fixed to mobile, and narrowband to broadband. At present, All-IP
networks are undeniably the mainstay for telco and enterprise networks.
However, as networks grow, with information flowing in and out in
uncertain directions and technologies being upgraded rapidly, it is
important that networks be flexible, intelligent, scalable, and
automated. Equally important is a change in how we think about network
architectural design. The core concepts for cloud computing development,
such as virtualization, software decoupling from hardware, centralized
resource pool scheduling, automatic deployment, high scalability, and
on-demand service provisioning, provide valuable references for network
development. Introduction of these concepts into the design of network
architectures and products can form the concepts of SDN, including
forwarding and control element separation (FORces) to centralize network
control and resource scheduling, software decoupling from hardware to
virtualize network functions, network function development of
cloud-based architecture to realize automatic deployment and high
scalability, and application-aware network development to improve
network capabilities, among others. By adopting these concepts, we can
lead the developments of next-generation product architectures and
network architectures, establish an intelligent application-aware
network that can intelligently schedule traffic, improve user experience
and network utilization, support traffic-based operations, and generate
new revenue streams.
-- Intelligent terminals will not just be tools for communications; they
will become extensions of our own senses. Terminals of the future will
be context-aware and have intelligent sensory capabilities. What makes a
terminal intelligent is far more than just its CPUs and operating system
- It also relates to its sensory capabilities. By using various sensors
(compasses, accelerators, gyroscopes, barometers, global positioning
systems, light sensors, microphones, cameras, touch screens, temperature
sensors, and infrared instruments), we can extend the human sensory and
nervous systems in the form of intelligent terminals, bringing us
one-step away from true brain-machine interaction. These intelligent
terminals will be context-aware, and able to both sense and predict
behavior through features such as auto-completion. By combining
cloud-based big data analysis capabilities with context-aware terminals,
we can provide personalized and intelligent services that realize true
human-machine interaction, enabling a dramatic improvement in the user
experience.
To respond to the ICT transformation being driven by the integration of the physical world and digital worlds, Huawei has developed a pipe strategy that covers cloud-based data center infrastructure (used for information storage and processing), infrastructure networks (used for information transmission and delivery), and intelligent terminals (used for information creation and consumption). Huawei has also set up its 2012 Laboratories, dedicated to researching next-generation technologies, while developing a SoftCOM (Software Defined Network + teleCOM) network architecture development strategy. Huawei will openly partner with industry peers to raise our information society to a new level.
SOURCE Huawei
Huawei
CONTACT: Lorraine Yim, +852-2963-6760, Lorraine.yim@bm.com
Beyond ICT: Embracing the Next Digital Revolution
SHENZHEN, China, Dec. 31, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- The history of human social development is, to some extent, the history of human scientific and technological progress. Humanity achieves scientific and technological progress by pushing its physical and mental limits and breaking away from the restrictions of time and space. This has been true in times both ancient and modern. Our ancestors built beacon towers and invented the wheel, while we have ubiquitous Internet connection and vehicles capable of reaching outer space. In the course of our scientific and technological development, two epoch-making inventions have been the steam engine and the computer. The steam engine ushered in the industrial age by providing far more power than what manual labor and beasts of burden could generate. The computer brought us into the information age through data processing capabilities that far outperform the human brain.
The past century has witnessed several waves of progress made possible by information technologies, including those used for communications (telegraphy, telephony, and broadcasting), home entertainment (radio, TV), computing, and the Internet. Information technologies drive economic growth worldwide and reshape the way people live and work. At present, we are evolving from a "society on wheels" to a "society on the network." However, information systems are still regarded as aid tools and support systems, keeping the digital and physical worlds somewhat parallel and compartmentalized. Now, as the digital and physical worlds begin to merge, the development of the Internet of Things has proven to be an effective catalyst of information-based developments and is sure to bring groundbreaking changes to all of humanity.
1. Beyond information and communications, the increasing integration of the digital and physical worlds will lead to a new digital revolution.
British philosopher Karl R. Popper divides human society into three parts: the physical world, the mental/psychological world, and the world of products of the human mind (also known as the world of objective knowledge). In the future, the physical world will be married with the digital world to form a new world. This integration will bring tremendous changes to the way we live and work, the way businesses operate, and the way society functions -- a new age of digital citizens, digital enterprises, and digital society.
-- Heavy reliance on networks will usher in an age of digital citizenry.
Nowadays, the ways in which people communicate, acquire information,
study, have fun, shop, make friends, and pair-bond are quite different
from what we saw just two decades ago. People not only have more means
to stay connected and obtain information, but have exceeded the
constraints of their physical location or time zone. With the
developments in this short time span, rather than waiting days or even
months for letters to arrive, people now contact others in real time via
email, instant messaging, and social networking. Likewise, people can
read the news online anytime, anywhere, rather than clinging to their
TVs or radios. Wikipedia and other interactive platforms allow people to
easily find answers to their questions, without having to wade through
voluminous encyclopedias or wait for office hour-working librarians.
Internet users exceeded 2.4 billion in 2012, over 34% of the world's
population, with this figure growing roughly 8% each year. There are
also as many as 1.1 billion smartphone subscribers right now, an
increase of 42% over 2011. However, this is just the beginning. As
digital lifestyles are adopted, digital citizenry will shape the
behaviors of next-gen consumers, changing the way people live, and
shaking up numerous industries. For example, traditional video sales and
rental stores are disappearing, and the 244-year old Encyclopedia
Britannica is no longer printed. It is very likely that in the next few
decades, children will ask why the word newspaper contains the word
paper in much the same way as our children today ask why the media is
still referred to as the press.
-- The age of digital business is drawing near, as seen by our commercial
dependence on networks for production and operations. Network
developments have significant influence on business activities. Which
business today can even continue to operate if its network fails?
E-commerce is booming and extending its reach into every consumer buying
decision, whether involving digital content (e-books and digital music),
cars, or home appliances, or even small items like snacks and slippers.
In 2012 alone, electronic retail sales worldwide totaled US$1.1
trillion. Information technologies will be further applied to enterprise
production and operations. Rather than being tools or support
components, ICT will become integral to production, decision-making,
customer relationship management, service provisioning, marketing, and
logistics. ICT will be employed in the building of end-to-end systems
that work in real time, playing a role in each and every link, from idea
generation to product conceptualization to precision marketing to
efficient operations to on-time delivery. In other words, digitization
will become a key characteristic of the future enterprise.
-- A borderless Internet gives rise to a digital society. Thanks to the
boundary-free nature of the Internet, a large number of borderless
virtual communities and societies have come into being. A plethora of
these communities will combine to form a digital society that transcends
borders, cultures, and races. Facebook is home to over one billion users
(or netizens), making it the third largest "citizenry" in the world.
This type of digital society, which mirrors while extending beyond the
physical world, will undoubtedly impact many aspects of social
administration and transformation, including politics, economy, law,
culture, news & media, security, and ethics, among others.
As a communications tool and support system, information technologies have significantly changed the way in which people live and work over the past few decades. They also spawn new economies and industries while reshuffling traditional ones. No doubt, the increasing integration of the physical and digital worlds will have a more tremendous impact on society. Such integration will direct ICT development in a way that can better serve society.
2. Smart infrastructure presents opportunities for further ICT development.
Technologically-speaking, ICT innovations mainly fall into five groups: mobility, broadband interconnectivity, social networking, cloud computing, and big data processing. The objective of these innovations is to transform the physical world into a smart world underpinned by smart ICT infrastructure, making the latter key to advancing information-based development.
-- From big data to "big" wisdom, the IT systems of carriers and
enterprises are evolving from post-processing support systems to
real-time business systems. This transition marks a fundamental change
in how IT functions. We are living in what may be the "big bang" of
information. In 2012, up to 2.4 zettabytes of data (that's 2.4 billion
terabytes) was generated globally; it would take as many as three
trillion DVDs to store all this data. By 2020, the amount of data
generated is expected to grow fourteen-fold. This data will have two
major sources. The first is from the huge amount of transactions between
enterprises and between enterprises and consumers. The second is from
countless interactions on the Internet, social networks, enterprise
service networks, and the Internet of Things. Social networking will be
particularly pervasive; it will be emblematic of all applications, not
just for social networking utilities like Facebook. Typically, big data
has four characteristics: variety, volume, velocity, and value. Velocity
and value are most important. By combining the analytical capabilities
of the human brain to determine behavioral patterns and the data
processing capabilities of computers, we can quickly analyze big data
and leverage digital assets to develop valuable diagrams that show
relationships, intentions, consumption patterns, interests, and
mobility. From big data to "big" wisdom, IT systems will be capable of
understanding not only the present preferences of customers but also
their future tendencies. This will make social administration, corporate
decision-making, and individual lifestyles smarter and more logical.
Therefore, IT systems for both enterprises and carriers shall no longer
function as post-processing support systems. Rather, they will become
real-time business systems that facilitate business operations, a
transition that marks a fundamental change in IT.
-- As traditional IT enterprise architecture is no longer capable of
processing the huge volumes of data being encountered, an
Internet-oriented cloud computing architecture is needed. The rebuilding
of data centers will prove the basis of supporting big data. Over the
past two decades, most enterprises have applied client-server
architecture for their IT. Although these systems were constantly
upgraded, their technical architecture was not, making each upgrade
repetitive and not transformative. With client-server, the server
primarily stores small volumes of enterprise transaction data, leaving
most data scattered across employee PCs (clients). As Internet
technologies have continued to develop, data has begun its migration
from the PC to the cloud, causing a sharp spike in data volume for the
latter. The need to store such vast volumes is exactly what is driving
innovations in computing and storage architectures, and giving rise to
the emergence of cloud computing architectures that feature
virtualization, parallel computing, distributed storage, and automation,
making for a dramatic change over the traditional architectures. In
fact, this new push is considered the third major wave of IT
transformation after those related to the mainframe and client/server
architecture. Presently, traditional enterprise IT architectures are no
longer capable of processing the voluminous amounts of data that they
take in. To answer this need, an Internet-oriented cloud computing
architecture is required. This architecture will form the basis of both
big data and "big" wisdom.
-- Low-bandwidth networks are hindering information-based development and
user experience improvement. A ubiquitous Gigabit network is a
prerequisite for any digital society. To lay the foundation for a
Terabit-network society, next-gen research is needed. As public and
private clouds develop, the amount of data they carry is sure to
mushroom, as the analysis of data is more effective when its storage is
centralized. To drive this migration, ubiquitous networking with greater
bandwidth is required to support data upload and data usage. Ubiquitous
broadband makes cloud computing accessible. Devices across the entire
industry chain, including content creation devices (video cameras),
cloud computing devices that process information, and terminals where
information is generated and consumed (PCs, tablets, etc.) all now
support high-definition video, even smartphones that cost only US$150.
However, the global network, which has an average bandwidth of only
3.1Mbps, is still unable to support high-definition video, leading to
the aforementioned hindrances to user experience. Therefore, we must
accelerate the construction of Gigabit networks to enable seamless
ultra-broadband access, the basis for building a digital society. We
must also intensify our research into and innovation efforts for
technologies such as next-generation mobile access, next-generation
digital subscriber line (DSL) access, passive optical network (PON)
access, next-generation Internet, and all-optical networking (AON). This
focus on future networks will lay a solid foundation for building a
Terabit-network society.
-- To support evolution from a "hard" pipe to a "soft" pipe, we should
develop programmable, scalable, application-agile, automatic, and open
intelligent networks. Software-defined networking (SDN) will lead to the
development of next-gen network architectures. Technologies are enablers
of network development. In the past two decades, driven by advancements
of technologies from time-division multiplexing (TDM) towards all-IP,
networks have undergone three different revolutions: analog to digital,
fixed to mobile, and narrowband to broadband. At present, All-IP
networks are undeniably the mainstay for telco and enterprise networks.
However, as networks grow, with information flowing in and out in
uncertain directions and technologies being upgraded rapidly, it is
important that networks be flexible, intelligent, scalable, and
automated. Equally important is a change in how we think about network
architectural design. The core concepts for cloud computing development,
such as virtualization, software decoupling from hardware, centralized
resource pool scheduling, automatic deployment, high scalability, and
on-demand service provisioning, provide valuable references for network
development. Introduction of these concepts into the design of network
architectures and products can form the concepts of SDN, including
forwarding and control element separation (FORces) to centralize network
control and resource scheduling, software decoupling from hardware to
virtualize network functions, network function development of
cloud-based architecture to realize automatic deployment and high
scalability, and application-aware network development to improve
network capabilities, among others. By adopting these concepts, we can
lead the developments of next-generation product architectures and
network architectures, establish an intelligent application-aware
network that can intelligently schedule traffic, improve user experience
and network utilization, support traffic-based operations, and generate
new revenue streams.
-- Intelligent terminals will not just be tools for communications; they
will become extensions of our own senses. Terminals of the future will
be context-aware and have intelligent sensory capabilities. What makes a
terminal intelligent is far more than just its CPUs and operating system
- It also relates to its sensory capabilities. By using various sensors
(compasses, accelerators, gyroscopes, barometers, global positioning
systems, light sensors, microphones, cameras, touch screens, temperature
sensors, and infrared instruments), we can extend the human sensory and
nervous systems in the form of intelligent terminals, bringing us
one-step away from true brain-machine interaction. These intelligent
terminals will be context-aware, and able to both sense and predict
behavior through features such as auto-completion. By combining
cloud-based big data analysis capabilities with context-aware terminals,
we can provide personalized and intelligent services that realize true
human-machine interaction, enabling a dramatic improvement in the user
experience.
To respond to the ICT transformation being driven by the integration of the physical world and digital worlds, Huawei has developed a pipe strategy that covers cloud-based data center infrastructure (used for information storage and processing), infrastructure networks (used for information transmission and delivery), and intelligent terminals (used for information creation and consumption). Huawei has also set up its 2012 Laboratories, dedicated to researching next-generation technologies, while developing a SoftCOM (Software Defined Network + teleCOM) network architecture development strategy. Huawei will openly partner with industry peers to raise our information society to a new level.
SOURCE Huawei
Huawei
CONTACT: Lorraine Yim, +852-2963-6760, Lorraine.yim@bm.com