Great networks don’t simply connect people and things. They organize them and orchestrate them.

Those of us who have been developing ultra-secure, real time Extranets recognize the value of what the current “lingua franca” is now calling “Network Slicing.” During the last decade, one of the companies I had the honor to lead (Ribbon Communications) mastered the art of virtualizing session border control, which has been broadly embraced by telecommunications service providers given their move to software defined networking which makes it possible for them to offer services to multiple clients, including large enterprises, over a shared physical network infrastructure.

Over the past several years, a lot has been written about blockchain’s potential to solve a myriad of challenges, from simplifying money transfers, to securing digital voting, to dramatically easing supply chain management, to locking in land title transfers.

Back in the day, otherwise known as the 1990s, the switch to electronic trading shook the traditional stock exchanges to their core. Most traditionalists spent more time ignoring the inevitable, with one major exchange official declaring publicly that the Internet, and the “World Wide Web” as it was known at its birth, were fads.

IP Networks, Expanded by The IoT Edge and Massive Growth in Content Will Drive New Peering Models This New Decade.

Taking companies public on traditional exchanges has never been easy, has always been risky, and can lead to “unintended consequences” for entrepreneurs, their teams, and their original, current, and future investors.

Many analyst firms in 2019 have forecast continuing growth in a market that didn’t exist a decade ago, the “WebRTC” market. WebRTC, or web-based real time communications (voice, video, data, unified communications, unified collaboration and more) started as an industry initiative in 2010. Some are predicting a $55 Billion market by 2026.

We’re facing serious challenges as a planet and a society as we head into the third decade of the 21st Century. My wife and I have three amazing grown children and one grandchild, and the generational view continues to broaden and lengthen as we consider the future.

We’re in the exabyte era, where the Exchange of Everything meets the Exchange for everything, where the data generated by humans, machines and pervasive systems will eclipse in a single day what we saw in 2000.

With new technologies that enable edge compute combined with cloud compute, with the advent of 5G, and with the success of network virtualization enabling us to move to network cloudification, we are ready to take superfast, super-secure and super-efficient Extranets to an entirely new level. Industry-sponsored Extranets will change the way networks services, from the first to last millimeter, are designed and funded.