3Com reveals its converged networking strategy to the finance industry

3Com Corporation, a leading global networking company, estimates that the global market for capital equipment to enable convergence technology in the enterprise, including banks, to be $15 to $20 billion a year by 2003.

"Thirty percent of corporations will be taking advantage of converged data, video and voice networks by the millennium," says John Hart, Senior Vice President and Chief Technical Officer at 3Com. "This convergence of networks will generate up to $10 billion and can be reinvested in customer service, new business opportunities and new technologies."

The finance industry is one of the largest markets for network products and services but there is not one solution or one type of product that is driving this market, explains 3Com SA`s pre sales manager, Paul Ruinaard. "Banks, brokers, exchanges and insurance companies are moving from mature mainframe technology to client/server open architecture," he says. "Mixtures of servers running different applications with a variety of protocols demanding compatibility with greater speed and wider bandwidth are keeping MIS and Network Managers challenged."

Arturo Cazares, Vice President for 3Com Latin America states that with today`s growing banking needs, banks must maintain a solid infrastructure and this begins with their network.

"Our solutions enable banks to have high powered network architecture that fully satisfies business-critical objectives and enables them to plan for future applications," he says. "Banks can provide better service to customers, and, with the available bandwidth, banks can operate at a 20 percent utilisation rate, down from as high as 60 percent in previous shared Ethernet networks."

Earlier this year, 3Com announced that Banco Santander S.A., Spain`s largest banking group with 5,288 offices worldwide, is using a Gigabit Ethernet backbone network at its United Kingdom headquarters in London based on 3Com`s end-to-end 10/100/1000 megabit per second (Mbps) migration system. Santanders`s London Office houses both Banco Santander, the commercial and corporate side of the bank, and Santander Investment, the bank`s international investment banking arm. Based on the new SuperStack II Switch 9000 SX Gigabit Ethernet switch, SuperStack II workgroup and desktop switches and network interface cards, the 3Com network delivers 1000 Mbps performance, enabling the 140-year-old bank to support the rapid expansion of its London office. The bank also built a new trading floor in London that relies on advanced systems driven by the 3Com network.

"CLAB presents us with great opportunity to showcase 3Com`s reliable solutions for the finance industry, and to clearly demonstrate the advantages of manageable and secure enterprise-wide mission critical networks," says Rafael Reusch, Managing Director for 3Com Bolivia, Chile, and Peru at a press briefing.

A typical enterprise, like a bank, could potentially reduce its long distance telephone expense 30 to 50 percent by placing its voice traffic on the data network. "The technologies used to build data networks are now far more sophisticated and better adapted to handle multiple types of communications, including voice," says John Hart. "We have added intelligence to our data networks not just in the core, but also in the access infrastructure and at the network access point to handle multiple classes of service over a common TCP/IP-based protocol infrastructure."

He adds that convergence is the next logical step in an evolutionary cycle that began when Robert Metcalfe (inventor of Ethernet and founder of 3Com) pioneered the birth of networking.

"From the drive toward making networks go faster and farther, to the introduction of intelligent technologies such as policy-based management, to the launch of the served markets, 3Com has blazed a trail that from day one was destined to lead to convergence." says Hart.

3Com`s Ruinaard points out that the most important innovations in our industry focus on the following four major trends that will determine how networking infrastructures evolve over the next few years.

The first two involve current applications, the last two deal with emerging, converged network applications:

1. From complex network administration to zero-based administration: No single innovation will eliminate the burden of complex administration. However, the continuous improvement of individual active network components, the enhancement of their auto-configuration and self-healing qualities, the movement of software intelligence into the attachment points of networks, and the grouping of individual products into fully configured network systems and solutions will each contribute towards the goal of zero-based administration.
2. From 9% availability to 99.99% availability: Again, progress will be achieved through improvements of individual devices, but just as importantly through better designs of the full network architecture.
3. From store and forward traffic to real-time traffic: This requires innovation and standardisation in the areas of Quality of Service (QoS) and Class of Service (CoS) across all elements of the network.
4. From device management to policy management: This trend is about making the network infrastructure behave differently and more appropriately depending upon who the user is, what the user does, and what policy has been ascribed by the network administrator on behalf of the user.

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