"The goal for networking in the next decade will be to provide individuals with a data cloud that follows them wherever they go. Whether I am attending a meeting in New York, sitting in my backyard in California, shopping in Tokyo, or meeting with a customer in Thailand, I should never be without any of my digital information. The network challenge [will be to make] this available whenever and wherever I am; the database challenge [will be] storing, organising, and retrieving all of this heterogeneous material."
Thomas G. Zimmerman, researcher at the IBM Almaden Research Centre