Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) Customer Partnership Conference

Ivan G. Seidenberg
Anaheim, CA
April 21, 2009

Video of Keynote: http://www.verizonwebcasts.com/corp/09006/seidenberg_disa/index.html

Keynote -- Customer Partnership Conference

Introduction by John Garing, Chief Information Officer and Director for Strategic Planning and Information -- DISA.

Thank you, John, and good morning to you all.  I am very honored and pleased to be with you this morning.  At Verizon, we are particularly proud to play a role in assisting you in the job of supporting our troops and keeping America safe, here and around the world. 

We are privileged to be part of the DISA team.

Last year at this conference, your former director, Lieutenant General Croom, said that America’s greatest weapons system is information.  Then it should be clear that DISA is every bit as vital to our country’s security as the Armed Forces you serve. 

As a strategic partner in defending America, you provide the systems that ensure our men and women in uniform have the supplies, data and real-time intelligence they need to do their jobs.  In a high-stakes environment, you hold yourselves – and your partners – to the highest possible standards for network reliability and security.  You have to be fast and flexible enough to put mission-critical information in the hands of decision-makers wherever the need arises – whether it’s an executive office across the Potomac, a Humvee in Afghanistan or a destroyer off the coast of Somalia. 

And just to add to the degree of difficulty, the world in which you perform this vital mission is changing faster every day – a transformation driven, at least in part, by the disruptive power of communications technology.

Today, some 2 billion people around the world are connected to the Internet.  About 4 billion people have a mobile device.  Traffic on global IP networks is growing at a compound annual rate of 45 percent a year.  Network power, processor speeds, and storage capacity are all increasing at exponential rates.  Since the beginning of the personal computer era in 1981, bandwidth speeds have increased 300,000 times over – a truly amazing number.  And sales of “smart phones” – basically, the next personal computer – are growing by 30 percent a year, to the point where they’ll account for one of every three mobile devices sold by 2011.

If the customer patterns we’re seeing at our company are any indication, the more bandwidth consumers get, the more they demand.

On any given day, the average adult in America spends 8.5 hours in front of a “screen.”  It could be the computer on your desk at work, the TV in your living room, the PDA in your pocket or the GPS in your car.  In fact, you’ve probably noticed in your own lives that the distinctions between all these different devices are blurring.  We’re becoming a “multi-screen” culture, in which customers expect “one-click” access to all their digital experiences on any device they choose.  Your own Department’s concept of “net-centricity” envisions a command-and-control environment where you can leave your desk with your terminal, go anywhere in the world, and have access to information in precisely the same way you do from home or work.

The combination of super-fast networks and super-smart mobile devices will make that vision possible -- unleashing employees from their desks and allowing them to work from their office in Central Headquarters, their mobile location on the front lines or anywhere in between.  Getting vital information to this kind of radically dispersed workforce – fast, securely and efficiently – is one of the major challenges facing any global enterprise and is certainly central to your global mission.

The game-changing network technologies I will discuss today are the technical cornerstones that will help make that possible.

***

First, let me just say a word about who we are and what we do:

• Verizon is a global enterprise with about 240,000 employees and just under $100 B in revenues.
  
  
• We’re the largest U.S. wireless provider, with more than 80 M wireless customers across the country. 
  
  
• On the landline side, we provide voice, broadband and video service to homes and businesses in 25 states and Washington D.C., about 25 percent of U.S. households.  
  
  
• We’re also a major provider of communications services to government and business customers, including 97 percent of Fortune 1000 companies and thousands of government agencies, hospitals and educational institutions.

We invest about $17 billion a year in wireless, broadband and global IP networks, with the goal of providing a seamless web environment that can deliver anything to customers, wherever they are, on any device.  To do that, we’re basically leapfrogging the current generation of technology to deploy the next-generation networks that will carry us -- and our customers -- into the future.

In the landline network, for example, we’ve spent many years transforming the traditional phone network around data, broadband and now video.  The first generation of broadband – DSL -- was all about text-based services like Internet access and e-mail.  Now, customers are using the Internet as a visual medium, which requires a different kind of network. 

We need an ultra-broadband network to serve this ultra-broadband world.

That’s why we began five years ago to build a network that takes fiber all the way to customers’ homes and businesses.  Today, this FiOS network passes more than 13 million homes in the U.S. and we’re expanding at a rate of 3 million homes a year, making us the leading provider of fiber networks in the U.S. 

Today, our fiber network can deliver download speeds of 50 megabits per second, with 100 megabit speeds on the horizon.  We’re upgrading our backbone with GPON, the fastest transport technology being deployed today.  And the really revolutionary part about fiber-to-the-home is the upload speed – 20 megabits today and true symmetrical speeds possible in the future.  With the growth of interactive and user-generated services and content, fast upload speeds are critical to reducing latency and allowing things like 2-way video messaging, interactive gaming, and on-line collaboration.  And as demand grows, we can add even more capacity by adding new wavelengths on our existing fiber, giving us a dynamic system that can keep pace with rapid innovation in this space.

With fiber, we’ll soon see applications that will blow today’s HDTV experience away, with three-dimensional graphics, holographic quality and radical interactivity.  Instead of scrolling down a list of books on Amazon.com, for example, you’ll be able to walk through the shelves of a “virtual reality” bookstore.  Instead of flying to the Mayo Clinic for a consultation, you’ll be able to show the doctor where it hurts without leaving home.  And instead of getting on a plane to meet with your colleagues, you’ll be able to sit down at a “virtual” conference table and talk to them in full 3-D, high-fidelity clarity … no matter where they are in the world. 

The opportunities for using super-fast broadband networks to transform the way we deliver health care, education and government services in this country are huge.  In fact, several government agencies are already using this very same FiOS technology, connected to the very same GPON backbone that powers our residential network, to deliver ultra-broadband connections to the desktop … a solution that significantly increases bandwidth to the end user while using 60 percent less power and requiring 60 percent less real estate.

That’s why we view FiOS technology as more than just a straight line from today’s cable and DSL networks.  It’s a game changer.

***

Technology is also changing the game in the wireless market, where demand for data and video is the driving force in the industry. 

It’s hard to overstate how fast wireless networks have evolved in the brief 25 year history of this industry.  In 2002, Verizon began to deploy a 2G all-digital packet network.  Since then, data traffic on that network has increased 300 percent.  In 2004, we introduced 3G technology, which increased data speeds by a factor of 10, giving customers the ability to do e-mail, use GPS, share photos and access the Internet on a wireless device.  We now have 3G throughout our whole network, creating a highly mobile broadband environment that surrounds customers with Internet connectivity wherever they go.

Now, wireless is about to enter the 4G era, which will take the mobile Internet experience to a whole new level.

4G will increase network speeds by another 8-10 times – making it faster, in many cases, than the current landline environment and fast enough for streaming video, videoconferencing, 3-D graphics and mapping, enhanced GPS services and more. 

Imagine delivering all that broadband power to a mobile device in the hands of America’s war fighters and front-line personnel around the globe and you get some idea of the revolutionary nature of this technology.

But the real transformative idea about 4G goes beyond the whole notion of a wireless “phone.”  In the 4G world, wireless will connect everything:  not just people-to-people, but also people-to-machine and machine-to-machine.  As 4G capabilities get embedded into our environment, there’s really no limit to the number of connections that can be part of the mobile grid:  vehicles, appliances, buildings, roads, weapons systems, medical monitors, inventory on trucks or in warehouses – all have the potential to become inherently intelligent, perpetually connected nodes on the mobile web.

With 4G connections in every device and appliance, PCs and mobile devices will be able to interact, share applications and move content seamlessly among different environments.  Machine-to-machine communications will automate global supply chains and monitor network operations.  It will allow the Armed Forces to capture images collected by satellites, sensors and unmanned aerial vehicles; transmit them with full-motion clarity to decision-makers in the Central Command; and relay tactical information back out to field forces, all at broadband speeds.  And for an organization like the Department of Defense that has to mobilize its personnel on a moment’s notice for duty anywhere in the world, 4G will make sure the Internet is available to them, wherever they go.    

Verizon is getting ready for this next phase of the industry.  We acquired a block of nationwide spectrum in the 700 megahertz range to give us a seamless national platform for a 4G network.  We’ve chosen Long-Term Evolution, or LTE, as the standard for our 4G infrastructure.  LTE is quickly emerging as the global standard, which will speed the transition to a truly globalized mobile broadband experience.  We’ve selected our infrastructure partners and completed the market trials and standards work.  We will begin deployment later this year and roll it out to 25 or 30 markets in 2010, with the expectation of faster roll-out thereafter.

And to develop the new 4G ecosystem of devices and applications, we’re working with partners and entrepreneurs from across the whole IT sector.  We’ve launched an Open Development program to certify new wireless devices, software and applications to run on our networks.  So far, we’ve approved 36 new devices, which range from:

• An inventory-management device;
  
  
• A “smart grid” technology that utilities can use to read meters and manage energy more efficiently;
  
  
• And a wireless tablet that health-care professionals can use as a portable medical chart for accessing patient records, entering vital signs and managing medicines – all in the field.

Products like these are just the beginning.  Our goal is to make our network the on-ramp for a whole new phase of wireless innovation.  With our investments in new spectrum, new technology and new operating models, we’re prepared to help our customers transition to this highly mobile wireless broadband environment.

***

Beyond FiOS and 4G wireless, the third leg of our network infrastructure is invisible to many of our customers, though certainly not to you:  it’s the global Internet backbone networks and the complex nodes, data centers, servers and high-speed connections that serve enterprise and government customers around the world.   

Verizon owns and operates Internet backbone networks composed of almost 500,000 fiber miles connecting six continents, more than 150 countries and 2,700 cities.  The firm TeleGeography recently ranked us the #1 most connected public Internet backbone network for the 10th consecutive year.  We also have more than 200 data centers in 22 countries and provide an extensive portfolio of managed IP, data, and security services.

Verizon’s global IP networks operate at once-unimaginable speeds:  40 gigabits per second, with 100 gigabits in our sights.  That ultra-broadband capacity is transforming the enterprise and government market the same way fiber is transforming the consumer market -- making possible a whole new generation of services that will change the way we do business:

• Virtual reality videoconferencing, anywhere around the globe;
  
  
• Virtual Private Networks that provide secure access for teleworkers and mobile locations;
  
  
• “Cloud” computing that locates services and applications like storage, e-mail, search and software in the network so you can access them on-demand, when and where you need them.

This shift to “on-demand” network-based applications represents a much more efficient way to run IT systems.  It will relieve government and business customers of the need to operate duplicative data centers or maintain all that underused hardware that takes massive amounts of people, space and power to keep it going.  In essence, it frees you from the business of running a phone company and lets you concentrate on the core mission of your own organization.

This combination of increasingly powerful networks and ever-more intelligent and mobile edge devices is a whole new way to run an enterprise – offering the possibility of more collaboration, more innovation, more efficiency and more flexibility.  But along with the tremendous benefits of these new technologies come new challenges. 

For you, network availability has to be at the top of that list.

We know for a fact that network availability is at the top of General Pollett’s list.  One day after the General took this job at DISA – December 19, 2008 – three undersea cables connecting Italy and Egypt in the Mediterranean Sea were cut, causing a 60 percent loss of both commercial and military capacity in the Gulf Region.  In fact, our people worked long hours alongside many of you in this room to help fix this catastrophic loss of bandwidth and restore critical command-and-control functions to military personnel in the Gulf.

At Verizon, we understand how vital these networks are to our customers.

In 2006, an earthquake struck off the coast of Taiwan and damaged eight major undersea cables.  Because of the redundancy of our Internet backbone networks, we were able to maintain full connectivity for our private IP customers, reroute priority traffic within minutes, and restore all other critical network traffic within about 12 hours.

We know there’s always more work to do when it comes to network availability, which is why we’re constantly adding to the redundancy of our global networks.  All of our major markets are protected by diverse nodes that let us reroute traffic in the event of emergencies.  We have 7-way diversity on both our trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific undersea cables.  We added 22 new mesh nodes in the United States and Canada last year.  We’re working with a consortium on a gateway that will connect Europe, the Middle East and India, which will be completed in 2010. 

Operating highly available networks also requires strong cyber-security.  The Verizon security teams tell me that they monitor more than 5 billion – that’s “billion” with a “b” – security events per day on the global Internet.  Because of the design of our networks, we are able to intercept the vast majority of those breaches before they can do harm to us or our customers.  We also leverage our security expertise with customers through our managed security services.  We can provide end-to-end security analysis, threat detection and warning -- from the network cloud, through the network, and all the way to the end user.  In fact, we just published a report on the work our forensic investigators have done in analyzing an astounding 285 million data breaches and providing a roadmap for securing the customer enterprise.

We understand that DISA relies on commercial networks for 95 percent of the infrastructure you use for strategic communications.  Our job is to make certain those networks are safe and reliable enough for the security of our nation – and our world – to depend on.

***

I’ve talked this morning about Verizon’s three network platforms – fiber to the home and desktop, 3G and 4G wireless, and global IP and mesh networks – and how they’re changing the game for 21st century communications.  These new communications platforms will help every large organization meet the challenges of managing the globally extended enterprise.  If we use technology thoughtfully and strategically, we can:

• Improve coordination and decision-making and put critical information in the hands of commanders at all levels.
  
  
• Share mission-critical information in real time, in 3-D, high-definition clarity.
  
  
• Locate work, facilities and talent anywhere.
  
  
• Share intelligence and spread innovation at the speed of light.
  
  
• Interoperate within the joint and combined environment, anywhere and at any time.
  
  
• And break down silos and collaborate with other agencies, partners, and allies using the universal language of the Internet.

Making all this a reality is going to require change.  As leaders, you know that change is more a function of culture than technology.  Sometimes in the Federal government environment, it takes longer to procure a new technology than the useful life of the technology itself.  So we have some cultural challenges to overcome if we want to get these game-changing technologies in the hands of users faster:

• We need to parallel process technology decisions – for example, working on new approaches to procurement at the same time we’re developing 4G devices that are rugged, encrypted, and customized for use in the field.
  
  
• We need to embrace open development as a way of getting new technology into the field faster.
  
  
• We need to take advantage of IP technologies to improve interoperability.
  
  
• And we need to work together to leverage Verizon’s capital investments and network-based services and applications to lower your operating and capital costs and eliminate the need for duplicate facilities.

Ultimately, it’s up to all of us at this conference to use this convergence of fiber to the desktop, ultra-broadband wireless, and a fully meshed global infrastructure to make the organizations we serve more effective and the world we live in more secure.

On behalf of everyone at Verizon, I thank you for all you do for our country and say once more how proud we are for the opportunity to contribute to your mission of keeping America safe and making information this country’s most important strategic weapon.

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