Cisco

In researching and developing the Planetary Skin with NASA, Cisco has been driven by the belief that the Internet is reaching its next turning point. The history of computer science has been described as a search for “what can be (efficiently) automated”. The fundamental challenge today is to look beyond this and find the best way to manage the relationship between what can be efficiently automated and what cannot – i.e. human judgments and interactions, especially across organizations and sectoral boundaries. The scale, diversity and location of the people, sensors, assets, machines, etc that will drive this phase of development requires a new set of capabilities both in and on the network. Nothing shows this more clearly than the Planetary Skin.

The Planetary Skin is a unique R&D program that will help shape the architectures, foundational technologies, tools and strategies that this next generation of the Internet will require. This fact has recently been recognized by Tim O’Reilly, originator of the phrase “Web 2.0” who, at the 2009 Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, identified two themes he sees as key for the future of the Internet. First, he said, sensors will surpass humans in front of their keyboards as the primary data source on the web and second, Moore's Law will need to be applied to humanity's greatest problems.

This is the Internet that requires highly distributed and collaborative geospatial, analytical, visual, and immersive decision support platforms that aggregate other subsystems using open standards i.e. the platform of platforms.

We require a platform of platforms that integrates legacy environments, yet also provisions distributed services able to traverse firewalls, automate event management, and tap into highly distributed unified computing and scientific modeling services and utilities, as well as handling the geospatial oriented networking demands of zettabytes of data. These requirements today are only addressed in a limited way, more often in proprietary approaches in specialized settings, behind firewalls, and in client/server silos that prevent us from extracting cognitive meaning.

The key characteristic of the future of the internet though will not be technological. Rather, the future of the internet will be defined by the way it enables a loosely integrated and constantly changing fabric of communication, collaboration, tele-immersion, and data services to enhance the decision-making processes of the human network.