If we can eliminate the enterprise LAN walled garden concept, it may be the most significant single catalyst to the next blitz of application, product and service innovation. LAN elimination would overhaul inter-enterprise communications – VoIP, video, telepresence and messaging. It would help enable the complete realization of the potential of VoIP and communications over IP, including the integration of real-time communications into all enterprise apps, workflows and processes ["enterprise LAN" refers to the way the LAN is administered and managed as a private walled garden (combination of firewalls, ALGs, policies, addressing, routing, etc.), rather than to any specific technical implementation of the LAN itself].
Enterprise LAN islands often completely prevent effective, universal, inter-enterprise real-time communications (most frequently in video and telepresence), and in other cases the LAN reduces island to island communication to least common denominator type approaches such as PSTN bridges (most often in VoIP and messaging). This is a problem today and is even more important tomorrow as real-time communication becomes increasingly embedded in applications, e.g. true real-time video communication.
We take the existence of the enterprise LAN paradigm for granted – a necessary evil to work around – the LAN walled garden is assumed in all standards-body work around enterprise VoIP and video, vendor roadmaps, service provider offerings, etc. But maybe the LAN can be eliminated, at least for most cases? In general, I think this means distributing “security” to the individual applications and devices, each of which has drastically different security requirements, rather than trying to first wall off the island the island of apps and devices. Specifics for future posts.
