EVEN the Year 2000 problem will not stop the steady march of banks and financial institutions toward Internet protocol (IP)-based networks. This, at least, was the prediction of a Cisco Systems official at a banking and financial technology forum held July 16.

"Y2K is basically a six-month problem. Eighty to 90 percent of the problems will go away after January 2000. On the other hand, the thing about information technology is that if you just wait for something to happen, it won't. You can't catch up if you stay too far behind," said Abdul Majid, Cisco's senior consulting systems engineer for Greater Asia.

According to Majid, the fast pace of technological change and the drive to become globally competitive would ensure that banks and other companies would migrate to IP networks. This is why Cisco is positioning itself as the best company to help banks migrate to IP their legacy SNA (system network architecture) systems during the heyday of IBM and the mainframe.

"It's clear that IP is the future. In fact, in that regard, Cisco is number one in the IBM market," Majid said, though noting that even IBM has undergone internal changes instead of keeping on pushing Token Ring networking technology.

At the forum, Majid talked about the campus network of the future, which he said would feature a multiservice platform supporting electronic commerce and convergent applications.

"The campus network of the future will not just be data but also voice and video, and the 21st century network will be IP-based. That's the message," he said.

Though stressing that this reality is already happening today, Majid admitted that the pace for the shift to IP networks would vary from region to region and country to country.

"I'd say that in five to 10 years we'll see this come true. It definitely won't happen overnight," he said. He added that he expects the United States to still take the lead, though Asia and Europe would be close behind. According to Majid, neither Y2K nor the regional crisis would likely upset this timetable for Asia, claiming that the worst of the crisis is over.

Asked to assess the state of the campus network in the Philippines, Majid replied: "I would say that in the Philippines, the IP message is already here. From what I've seen, the Philippines is not far behind other Asian countries and not far behind in several industries. For example, the banking sector is now in the process of upgrading and migrating to high-speed multiservice networks."

He noted that one of the main issues raised by the audience during his presentation was the deployment of asynchronous transfer mode (ATM), a high-speed packet-based networking technology.

"ATM is still a great technology for the wide area network. It's still flexible and still has a lot to offer for convergence. But for the campus network, with the emergence of Gigabit Ethernet, it's going toward Ethernet and IP. Anyway, Cisco will continue supporting both to cater to different customer needs. You just have make sure you understand ATM before you deploy it," he said.

For campus networking, Cisco's solution is the Catalyst family of switches.

"Now, with the coming of convergence, we've also added voice capabilities to the Catalyst campus switches. Now you can use IP and Ethernet phones," he noted.