Content area
Full Text
The digital revolution has shaken up the telecommunications equipment industry, causing companies to burn the midnight oil in their R&D labs or lose out to computer vendors building their own data switches in the form of communications servers.
As head of Northern Telecom Ltd. and an executive of telecommunications companies for more than 20 years, Jean Monty is keenly aware of the information revolution and its effect on his industry.
The 48-year-old president and chief executive of Northern Telecom, Mississauga, Ontario, recently told a group of Wall Street analysts that data traffic now represents half of a traffic carried on wide-area communications networks, and that probably will grow 30 percent to 35 percent over the next few years.
"We're now expanding significantly in the enterprise network...and we were never
previously
recognized for that," Monty says.
Perhaps there never has been so great a challenge to telecommunications players as today, as companies such as Northern Telecom are finding themselves competing with the computer industry for the first time in building equipment to support demanding data communications over public networks. It is a race to see who will answer the call.
Equipment manufacturers got their first taste of supporting data on their networks when use of fax machines hit its peak in the mid-1980s. But that demand for data support was nothing compared with today's sophisticated applications traveling between enterprise networks or the home and the Internet.
"To the communications-traffic world, the biggest opportunity today is the...