The best application in the world won’t work if the network has a problem, and the best network in the world isn’t worth much without applications and data to run on it.

The network engineer or technician no longer is dealing with just the transfer of bits and bytes between data jacks - the network itself has changed. The network is now part of the devices on each end and part of the applications that are running on them,

Network people need the developers, and project managers to work the problem to resolution without finger pointing. The developers, system administrators, DBA’s, project managers, etc. need to be willing to join in, not just hand the issue off to the network people.

I’d like to think a network person is one of the smartest people and most technically savvy, but I sure have been proved wrong once or twice by some of the programmers and security people.