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Information is the key to business productivity and growth. The fundamental problem faced by organisations with remote users is that the volume of information is growing faster than the remote bandwidth needed to distribute that information.
To illustrate the problem, consider the alternative methods available for distributing the contents of a full CD-ROM to remote users. The first option is to duplicate and distribute a CD-ROM. The alternative is to download the same information using a modem. The download time for 640 megabytes (MB) using a 56 kilobits per second (KBS) modem is just over 24 hours. The projected technology trends for 2002 are that it will take over 4 days to download the increased CD capacity.
CD-ROMs are the standard mechanism for bulk distribution of software and static information. The current capacity of a CD-ROM is 640 megabytes. Demand for increased capacity is primarily being driven by multimedia in the form of high quality graphics, sound and video. The next generation of CD-ROM technology is known as DVD (Digital Versatile Disk). DVDs currently hold 4.7 gigabytes, a seven-fold increase in capacity. Improvements in DVD storage technology will bring them to a capacity of 17 gigabytes in the next four years. DVD drives are already shipping on today's high-end notebooks. As well as having the advantages of more capacity and faster access time, DVD drives are also backward compatible. This means that DVD drives will continue to be able to read existing CD-ROMs.
Modem speeds are also increasing, but not by as much as storage. Double speed ISDN should be widely in use by the end of the year 2000. Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) technology has in theory the capacity to deliver speeds of 8 megabits per second over copper wire. However the reality is that it is very unlikely that DSL technology will deliver more than 384 kilobits per second to any significant percentage of remote users until sometime after 2002. The reasons for this are a combination of technical limitations of DSL, lack of agreed standards for DSL and the throughput limitations of the Internet.
The conclusion is that the optimum solution is to deliver the bulk of the information on CD-ROM, and use SoftCD to deliver the updates electronically. SoftCD is the only product currently on the market which will transparently and efficiently update the content of a CD or DVD with minimal user intervention, and no changes to the applications software.
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