How A Rocket Took Off: Juniper Founder Pradeep Sindhu (Part 7)

SM: What is the role of networking going forward? What does the future hold?

PS: In the grand scheme of things, networking is a phenomenally important part of society’s infrastructure. It is the technology that is used to connect people and things together for the purposes of sharing information. It existed 10,000 years ago in a different form. If you look back at history, every time networking technology has improved by an order of magnitude, it has resulted in stupendous things happening.

The Internet and its related technologies are the latest incarnation of the progression of networking. If I have a set of information processing entities and I isolate them from one another, I can then see their independent capabilities. If I connect them together with a network their capabilities are tremendously enhanced. The richer the network that connects them, the greater the capability.

Look at invention. “Connections” by James Burke is really an interesting read. He traces how various inventions happened and what events triggered those inventions. In every case, it was happenstance where Person A was thinking about a problem and happened to talk to Person B. When the two came together, new technology was born. That new technology then led to other things. Individuals have only a partial view of what is possible.

In order to be alive, humans need to be connected. I think there is an intimate relationship among humans between the need to communicate and the size of their brain power. That same phenomena exists in computing and computer networks. There is a strong relationship between the number of MIPS a machine has and the speed of the network to which it is connected. That relation has been true for the last three to four years.

Networks play a very important role in the development of societies. Because they are abstract, we tend not to pay as much attention to them. You cannot touch the Internet. Human beings focus on what is tangible. I think the network is even more important than the endpoints that are connected. Look at the human brain. You have neurons and connections between neurons. The magic is in the communication network, which we do not understand today.

I take the very long view in networking. I think that we are only scratching the surface regarding what is possible to do with networking technology. The way we connect things together is just one technology. Networking in its truest sense will be with us forever.

SM: One technology that I really like is telepresence. The limit now is 18 people in a room connected across eight cities. Those are still very small numbers. If you take that high-resolution experience and connect it to a mass, then the results would be phenomenal. When do you think we will get there?

PS: There are two possible questions you are asking. What is the quality of the image that I can project between two points? We are very close to getting high definition from anywhere to anywhere at a reasonable cost. The other issue is, if I had the ability to virtually put 10,000 people in a room, what modes of communication could I use? They could not talk at the same time. The only thing that works is one-to-many. The modes of communication where the most interesting things happen are one-to-one. Billions of one-to-one conversations.

SM: The different communication experiences all have their value. A one-to-many is very much like the television. This experience right now talking with you accomplishes an objective. What if I had a camera here? This conversation could go to all of the IITs.

PS: That leverage of taking one particular train of events and making it available to a large number of bases at the same time is absolutely within the power of the technology to do. What I am trying to say is that in this broadcast mode things can’t be very interactive.

SM: I fully agree with you on the value of interactive experiences. Today a small number of television companies reserve the right to really high-quality broadcast television. We have had an incredible democratization of print media because of blogs. At what point does that transfer to television?

PS: High-quality presentations consist of two elements. One is the technology involved, which is coming down in price. The other is that it requires a level of expertise. Nobody has found a way to automate that, which means that the skill set to do video editing is still required. You could put together a studio production facility with a relatively modest amount of money, but you cannot replace the people.

SM: Business travel sucks. People do not want to do it. Fully interactive video collaboration is a hot topic among CIOs and CEOs right now.

PS: That is phenomenally important. In communication networks, the element that is most valuable is any-to-any interactive communication on a large scale. It is also the hardest to provide from a technology standpoint. It almost seems like there is a law that requires anything which is really valuable be very difficult to actually do.

SM: Thank you for your time. This has been very insightful.

This segment is part 7 in the series : How A Rocket Took Off: Juniper Founder Pradeep Sindhu
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