Technology paves way to marketing's future

September 30, 2002

BY MICHAEL KRAUSS

Most marketers take the infrastructure for granted.

Transportation backbones. Communications backbones. We don't think about infrastructure unless it breaks down. When the power fails, the phones don't work, the roads are clogged or the emails don't flow-that's when we get excited.

We should instead be asking, "What's coming next and how will we capitalize on the future infrastructure?"

After writing about electronic payment systems last month, I took a vacation in northern Michigan. When I stopped for gas, it took several minutes, not several seconds, for my credit card transaction to be authorized. When I ate dinner at the Freshwater Lodge near Traverse City, it took 15 minutes for me to pay by credit card.

The manager came up and apologized, saying the network systems were down and he'd process my charge later. Would I mind signing an old fashioned chit, and he'd process the charge later? He took my home telephone number just in case there was a problem and he needed to reach me later.

Since my credit card bills were paid up, I assumed the urban migration to this resort area had overloaded the communications grid. Leaving the restaurant, I realized the grid's failure had slowed the turnaround of my table on a busy night and cost the proprietor and the server some profit margin. The manager said the system often gets overloaded this time of year.

My dinner experience at the Freshwater Lodge started me thinking about infrastructure and led to a conversation with Joel Mambretti, director of the International Center for Advanced Internet Research (iCAIR) at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. Mambretti is a man who believes in the power of infrastructure. He's leading an effort called OMNInet that's physically piloting a new form of network communications that uses light waves or photons to connect the Internet backbone. The result is a communications network tha uses a 10-gigabit per second Ethernet protocol that's 10-to-100 times faster than typical corporate networks.

Imagine what that could do for commercial marketers. Actually, on first blush it's a little hard to conceptualize. Sitting with Mambretti in his lab, I found it hard to grad just what a 10-to-100 times improvement in network speeds might mean. Then he showed me a series of potential applications of the technology.

"The first benefits will be seen in the scientific community," said Mambretti, who expects today's particle physicists who use data-intensive supercomputing applications to benefit most. "High-speed networks are changing the academic community." In the past, researchers postulated and created physical world experiments to prove their theories. Tomorrow, thanks to massive computing and communications grids, they'll be able to model and simulate reality refining their theories in real time. The result should be a quicker evaluation and evolution of scientific theories.

Following right behind the scientists and academics will be commercial engineers and medical professionals.

"The first commercial benefits will likely be seen in heavy industrial applications," said Mambretti, suggesting that collaborative industrial design applications even more sophisticated than those of the Boeing 777 will be possible.

On the healthcare front, Mambretti points to a new state-of-the-art medical facility that no longer produces X-ray results on film. Patient X-rays are shared throughout the building digitally. Unfortunately, doctors can't look at the X-rays at home because the bandwidth isn't available to connect them to the hospital. Downloading these images simply takes too long. With tomorrow's networks, that's going to dramatically change.

When I asked what tomorrow's networks mean for the consumer, Mambretti shot back, "It means HDTV is already obsolete."

That's when I got the message. Virtual reality environments that provide simulated tactile sensation will be commercially viable. High-resolution holographic images will be available in shopping mall kiosks. Massive data-mining will be possible on an almost instantaneous basis.

For a few minutes, listening to Mambretti talk I forgot about the recession we are facing. I forgot about the failures of Global Crossing and MCI and the problems facing Qwest communications. Yes, misaligned investments have plagued the telecommunications sector and plenty of fiber optic cable has too little traffic, no question about it.

Yet there are also a series of geeks who meet every two years to share their theories and their experimental applications in network design. Those geeks come together at the biennial iGrid conference in late September in Amsterdam. This year, the conference showcased 29 extremely high-bandwidth technical innovations and applications from 15 different countries.

Most marketers don't know or care much about the iGrid conference. The inefficiencies of today's Internet and the future of the network infrastructure doesn't matter to them. The lights are on, the trucks, trains and planes are moving, and the e-mail is getting delivered.

After all, there's a recession going on, don't you know? Still, as a marketer, I feel a lot better prepared for the future having listened to Joel Mambretti.

Michael Krauss is a partner with DiamondCluster International in Chicago. He can be reached at michael.krauss@diamondcluster.com or news@ama.org.