Book excerpt: From Federal Express's package tracking Website, to Amazon.com, netcentric computing has been evolving, slowly-but-surely, one solution at a time, since the early 1990s. Over the past year or so, the trickle has grown into a torrent of netcentric innovations of wider and wider scope, developed in companies around the globe. Now, a new enterprise computing paradigm has sprung into being. Until now, there has been no comprehensive netcentric model, clearly defined netcentric system architecture, or established set of guiding principles to help you gear up for this next stage in the evolution of enterprise computing. written by the experts at Andersen Consulting, Netcentric and Client/Server Computing: A Practical Guide, offers you this and more. Of course, a book can never take the place of experts who wrote it, but this revised, updated, and expanded edition of Andersen Consulting's noted guide is an important first step in acquiring the knowledge and skills you need to bring netcentric capabilities into your organization. You'll learn from 13 acknowledged world experts what netcentric computing is, how it works, and how you can use it to provide your organization with an unstoppable competitive edge. Based upon their experiences with mission-critical netcentric implementations at 100 of the most successful business organizations on the planet, these experts explain how netcentric computing can help you enable new business capabilities. Using dozens of fascinating case examples, they show you how to seamlessly integrate computing, communications, and knowledge resources in order to forge solid links among your company's employees, units, customers, suppliers, and partners, regardless of time, location, device, or content. And, they provide priceless advice and guidance on how to exploit the endless array of possibilities provided by netcentric computing to develop exciting new customer services, identify new markets, cut costs, engineer internal processes for improved business performance, and more. Netcentric and Client/Server Computing is divided into four, self-contained sections for ease of reference. Section I introduces you to basic netcentric principles and concepts, provides an overview of state-of-the-art in netcentric computing models, and develops a solid business case for netcentric computing. Section II acquaints you with the various technologies involved and describes a comprehensive netcentric architecture. Section III is devoted to crucial analysis, design, and implementation issues, including design specifics for architectures, applications, and networks; rollout strategies; and ongoing management of distributed operations. Section IV explores emerging technologies and their likely impact on the future of netcentric computing.