Padmasree Warrior, chief technology & strategy officer of Cisco Systems, summarizes a panel discussion that took place at this year’s Mobile World Congress. Cisco customers Deutsche Telekom and Vodafone participated, along with Warrior’s peers from Ericsson and Huawei. The panel addressed the evolution of the Network Architecture for mobile service providers and the impact of apps, the cloud and Internet of Things.

“From the infrastructure to the user, everyone agrees that the future will both bring and be driven by significant changes to the Network. In particular, by bringing together access, network and cloud we will create new business opportunities and enhanced user experiences,” she writes in a Cisco blog post.

Warrior lists some of the ongoing technology trends and market transitions affecting the Network: “Device growth and smartphone adoption has been increasing exponentially and we estimate 50B connected devices by 2020,” she writes. “We further anticipate that by the end of this year, there will be more mobile devices than humans connected to the Internet.”

“At the same time compute architecture is moving from the client-server to the mobile-cloud era; and value is shifting from the Web economy to an App economy,” she adds. “All of this is resulting in a data deluge with an estimated 13x increase in mobile data traffic from 2012-2017.”

Billions of people and things are connected, creating more “data-in-motion” than ever before. “Data-In-Motion refers to real-time and near real-time information such as connection type, location, device type, access speed, and other contextual and personalized data. When this data is extracted, combined and correlated at multiple layers we deliver predictive intelligence that is extremely valuable for many business and consumer services,” she explains.

All of this is working to create the “Internet of Everything,” which Cisco defines as “bringing together people, process, data and things to create networked connections that are more relevant and valuable than ever before — thereby turning information into actions.”

Thus, while mobility is associated with devices now, it will soon be associated with the persons and/or things that are connected to the network. In order to keep up with these changes, service providers “have the opportunity to enable mobility beyond a connection to monetizing those connections with new experiences and services.”

Warrior suggests that “the task ahead is to pursue these new revenue opportunities while at the same time, optimizing existing network investments.”