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Ultranet, the next network

A bleeding-edge federation of startup companies strives to reinvent the next-generation network

By Miko Matsumura, JavaWorld.com, 11/01/97

Page 2 of 3

Stage three: extranets

• Defining technologies: "Crossware"
• Business model: Giving away information and software for free (but only to members of partner companies)
• Winners: Big Large companies -- Netscape, Microsoft, Sun
• Ecological Metaphor: Eutrophication, a lake turns swampy

Once a large number of corporate networks were running on open Internet Protocol it was a simple breakthrough to realize that you could interconnect the intranets, thus creating an inter-intra-net. Always willing to create new words for what continues to be essentially a business repackaging of stage-one technology, the words "extranet" and "crossware" came into being. The essential value of these is to enable access to your partner company's Web pages (and hence database, in many cases) from within your own company's internal Web page. It's unclear that there will be any big winners in this arena -- it's just too early to tell.

But I will characterize the Extranet stage as the last stage in the evolution of the idea of giving away free information and software, an idea that gradually may be reaching the limits of its value. How many ways can you repackage the idea of giving away information for free? One indicator that the ideas are starting to play out is that big, slow-footed companies now are starting to reap the benefits of the stabilization. In nature, this process is called eutrophication, and can be defined as the process by which nutrients are added to a system. The culmination of eutrophication on a lake, for example, is the nutrient-rich swamp, which suggests that the growth remaining in this ecosystem is declining.

Stage four: the ultranet

• Defining technologies: Java, IPv.6, SET, OODBMS, XML
• Business model: value exchange of goods and services (open, complex market economy)
• Winners: creative companies of all sizes -- to be determined

I'm going to indulge in some gratuitous, tongue-in-cheek word invention here. I'm going to invent a name for a network (the same exact network as in stages one through three, actually) that's so magnificently superlative that it will put a stop to all of the Internet-intranet-extranet naming games. This name is the name to end all names, and characterizes the mother of all networks: the ultranet. What are the defining characteristics of the fourth stage of the Internet? This phase is foreshadowed by the invention of IPv.6, Internet Protocol version six. The very protocol that lies at the heart of stages one through three is being reinvented in order to provide more address space. How much more space? Up to 133 million addresses per square meter of the earth's surface! This suggests an Internet with orders of magnitude of more people and devices connected. How will we accommodate browsing information in these new ways?

The XML standard, as released by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), holds the promise of deconstructing the HTML Web through well-defined interfaces. This means that your alphanumeric pager can grab a small piece of a news page -- a headline or a stock quote, for example. This form of structured interface creates the possibility of Web automation. Web automation allows collections of databases and people to chain functionality and aggregate information over multiple "hops," instead of using a strictly client-server model that today's Web holds. But going beyond simple structured interfaces, XML defines extensibility through programmer-defined mark-up tags. If a browser environment encounters an unfamiliar tag, it downloads an executable that allows for rendering of the content. Ultimately, structure and extensibility enable an object-oriented approach to take hold on the Web. The structure can be seen as an Interface Definition Language (IDL), and the extensibility can be seen as a direct way to marshall an object from a remote server.

 

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