Israel Cidon, D.Sc.
Israel Cidon
Jordan and Irine Tark Chair Professor
Department of Electrical Engineering, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology
Speech Title: 
"Enterprise 2025: When Mobility Meets Clouds"
Abstract: 
For many years the high-tech industry has a noticeable distinction between consumer products sold to a mass of price-sensitive individuals and business products serving enterprises with large IT budgets. The consumer vendors provided no-frills products in high volume and fiercely competed to match the rapidly falling prices, of fast aging commodity hardware and software. The enterprise vendors provided cutting edge solutions, aimed at increasing productivity and profitability, and enjoyed a locked in, high margin business. Enterprises have traditionally invested in skilled IT departments, reliable and secure networks and data centers, and highly customized applications. These expenses were justified by considerable productivity gains. This old model of enterprise products backed by enterprise IT is being challenged by two paradigm shifts, arising from new technologies and changing behaviors in consumer markets. First, the web has produced a large number of consumer applications such as web mail, search, e-commerce and social networks. These applications not only lower costs, leveraging economies of scale, but also offer higher quality through continuous cycles of improvements. Agile methodologies allow developers to learn user behavior and immediately modify the product. The same web technologies have enabled a wave of enterprise SaaS (Software as a Service) applications (e.g, CRM, HR, data analytics).Yet, some business applications have not fully migrated, since most businesses have some unique business requirement that cannot be addressed by a generic SaaS application. The migration to SaaS make the enterprise IT and the on-premise enterprise systems fragmented and outdated. Second, smart mobile consumer devices have been rapidly adopted for business use. These provide knowledge employees with ubiquitous business access, and have become crucial for ensuring shorter response times and higher productivity. Consequently, the business is tied to the employee and not to the workplace or the office. In addition, these mobile devices access SaaS applications directly, bypassing the traditional enterprise on-premise infrastructure. In this talk, we will address some of the main problems facing this emerging enterprise IT model. As most business transactions are conducted between mobile users and web applications, many existing enterprise networks and security systems such as firewalls and data leak prevention have become obsolete. Similarly, solutions for providing infrastructure management, quality of service, reliability and survivability need to be redesigned and replaced. We will highlight legacy and emerging technologies that are impacted by these trends in academic research and new enterprise products.
Bio: 

Israel Cidon is a chaired professor and a former dean of Electrical Engineering at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology. He is currently a visiting professor at Stanford University. Israel was also involved in technology startups and companies.

In 2012, Israel co-founded Sookasa that enables corporates to use, secure and manage consumer cloud storage services. In 2000, he co-founded Actona Technologies that pioneered the fields of Wide Area File Systems (WAFS) and WAN optimization. Actona was acquired by Cisco in 2004 and is the source of Cisco, Wide Area Application Services (WAAS). In 1998 he co-founded Viola Networks, the provider of Netally, a distributed active network testing suite that was acquired by Fluke Networks in 2008. In 1981 he co-founded Micronet, an early vendor of mobile computers (Israeli IPO 2006).

In 1985-94 he was a research member and the manager of the Network Architecture and Algorithms group at IBM Research in NY, leading the first implementations of triple-play packet network and metropolitan optical resilient packet rings (was also the technology behind IBM’s first storage area network). He received the IBM outstanding innovation award in 1989 and 1993. In 1994-5 he started and lead high-speed networking at Sun Labs, Mountain View., working on open network control architectures.

His academic research covers aspects of data networks including mobility, wireless, Internet and Network on Chip (NoC). He is a co-author of over 170 refereed papers and 27 US patents.

October 16-17, 2012

The Rose Project

Western Digital