My name is Chatschik Bisdikian. I work at IBM Research, have served on the editorial board of IEEE Network for several years, and am the new Editor-in-Chief (EiC) for the magazine. I feel deeply honored to be joining the group of distinguished EiCs who have elevated the magazine to such an elite position in its area. I would like to extend my sincerest thanks to all of them and their hard working editorial boards for their service to the magazine and our communications community in general. I would like to thank especially my predecessor, Peter O'Reilly, not only for his persistent dedication to the fundamentals behind the existence of this magazine, and his willingness to do so at the highest possible level for longer than should have been necessary, but also for serving as a mentor of mine as I was preparing to take on this new challenging responsibility; this current issue was prepared under his supervision. I am very glad to announce that Peter has agreed to continue serving the magazine in his new role as a Senior Technical Editor. I am looking forward to his continuing guidance and service to the magazine. I would also like to thank our departing senior technical editors and former EiCs John Daigle and Jorg Liebeherr for their long service and contributions to the magazine. Their experience and wisdom will be dearly missed.
Looking Forward
As the marketplace places more and more emphasis on return on investment (ROI), it becomes apparent that buyers of information technology products are moving away from merely purchasing the newest technology pieces; in other words, they no longer buy information technology products for the sake of the technology itself. Instead, they focus on services-oriented end-to-end solutions that provide tangible added value to their bottom lines and their customers. Network practitioners, engineers, and more so researchers need to adapt to this trend by not only renewing and deepening their knowledge in their areas of expertise, but also increasing the breadth of their understanding of the role their work plays in providing complete information solutions; for example, not only how routing could occur on a spontaneously created ad hoc network, but also how valuable services may be delivered on a network supporting emergency response operations that is spontaneously created at an incident site. It is not only how roaming could happen from one access point to another, but also how it may happen seamlessly across administrative domains, across different access technologies controlled by different carriers, or even across different devices; how networking may be used to support asset management, supply chains, telematics services, location and other context-aware solutions, and so on.
I believe IEEE Network also needs to reflect this trend toward value-added services and solutions. The magazine should expand its focus by presenting and discussing not only the newest and latest networking technologies, but also presenting and discussing the role these technologies play in delivering the network-dependent solutions that both the consumer and business markets are requesting and looking for. This expanded focus is a challenge I place before our article contributors, the guest editors of our special issues, the editorial board members, and ultimately myself to meet. I believe we have an excellent start along this quest with this special issue, Middleware Technologies for Future Communication Networks.
I welcome your feedback about this note and the magazine; please send a note to me at bisdik@us.ibm.com. For the latest news about the magazine, including the all important Call for Papers for upcoming special issues, please visit http://www.comsoc.org/livepubs/ni/index.html. In closing, I strongly urge prospective contributors to the magazine to consult and follow the guidelines described in the author and submission guidelines pages accessible from the above site.