Tech Visions: New media is IT's next frontier

Prepare for a bumpy ride...

Experts argue new media will spell the demise of the IT professional. Not true, says Silicon Valley-based Howard Greenfield. But that doesn't mean CIOs will get off without huge upheavals.

A new frontier is opening up as broadcast media and telecoms are swallowed whole by the internet. Audio, image data types, internet telephony and video present new challenges for CIOs responsible for corporate performance, security and productivity.

Gartner forecasts the IT services market will be worth nearly $1tr by 2011 - more than seven per cent compound annual growth, up from around $675bn in 2006. The once separate domains of IT and media have become intertwined and now form part of this massive spend.

And that convergence is bound to lead to plenty of mistakes along the way. "I could probably fill an encyclopaedia with the mistakes we've made over the past year," says Beth Comstock, president, Integrated Media, at NBC Universal.

If this is the candid experience of a media industry specialist, the challenges for non-media corporate professionals are likely to be even greater. But like their counterparts in the broadcast industry, IT leaders will need to cushion the chaotic disruption that media introduces to the network.

"The increasing use of media will place additional demands on IT infrastructures," says Neville Chamberlain, managing director of BPI Improve, a UK-based media operations consultancy. "CIOs will have to deal not only with LAN and WAN performance but with managing internal and purchased content."

There's excitement about media expanding applications, according to Chamberlain. But video in particular eats up network bandwidth while raising issues relating to copyright and idle channel surfing.

Media within the enterprise has come of age after a series of landmark multi-billion dollar acquisitions including Google buying YouTube for $1.65bn, eBay acquiring Skype for $2.6bn and News Corp's $580m purchase of MySpace.

These deals and others have paved the way for new commercial tools and a generation of end-users making corporate digital media the lingua franca of the next decade. It provides IT job security in managing a new class of enterprise assets that entail:

• Technical fire walling for media sharing, blogs, instant messaging, social networks and syndication feeds.
• Acceptable use codes for employee-generated content - what's appropriate, what's off bounds.
• Surfing controls to see who's watching football or doing their Christmas shopping on company time.
• Corporate copyright policy on downloading and editing or attribution infringement.

What's ahead for the corporate network is already brewing in the entertainment and sports worlds. Just follow the money. The US National Football League (NFL) expects to see $900m from digital media developments, such as a new five-year Sprint contract to deliver NFL programming to mobile devices.

Speaking in a CIO Magazine interview, NFL CFO Barry Wolper sees this as a challenge "especially for our IT folks [who must] figure out how to make those links between what consumers want and the ways that they are accessing it".

At Google's Zeitgeist partner conference I attended in October, FedEx CIO Robert Carter said: "The information about the package is as important as the package itself." In the same way, media has become as mission-critical as legacy text and numerical data that has always underpinned capital reporting.

It is an IT challenge plain and simple, according to Cisco CEO John Chambers. "When the CIO is going to the CEO talking about infrastructure and collaboration," says Chambers, "it won't be about text - it will be video. And you're seeing video just take off at tremendous speeds around the world, not at 50 to 100 per cent growth of networks per year but 200 to 300 per cent being probable, and 300 to 500 per cent being possible."

Before 1995, running media over the corporate network was a challenge - a dream even. Today, it is almost commonplace even though there has been no ceremony, no golden spike to mark the connection of the alphanumeric and BitTorrent user-generated continents.

And when it comes to the corporate IT professional's mastery of the devices and issues, most don't have this expertise yet, according to Gartner VP David Mitchell Smith. "But many have parts of their organisation with public-facing websites whose team's skills can be leveraged to deal with it."

New, younger employees are bringing the ingenuity of non-sanctioned devices and software into the enterprise, just as the personal computer challenged the limits of IT networks a few decades ago.

Users turn these new developments into productivity with or without IT support, according to Smith. The good news about the security, productivity and performance factor is that the lessons already learned in media-centric organisations can be applied immediately. The bad news is that adopting such applications opens up potential breaches.

These changes are inevitable. Complacency is not an option. As Cisco's Chambers puts it, to win in this race you have to be ahead of the media curve. In Cisco's case, part of its success has come through investment in high-end router product design to handle tens of millions of videos. And as Chambers points out: "You had to bet seven years before it was obvious to the market."

Howard Greenfield, president of Go Associates, is a digital media strategist, columnist, and co-author of IPTV & Internet Video, Focal Press, 2007.