John Curran, ARIN CEO & President

John Curran, the voluble president and CEO of the American Registry for Internet Numbers, didn’t waste any time exhorting attendees at last week’s North American IPv6 Summit in Denver to break the logjam delaying the widespread implementation of the next-generation protocol.

“Why are we doing this?” he asked. “What is the one event” that will spark the momentum needed to fuel IPv6′s adoption?

Curran said the energy sparked by the realization that IPv4 addresses would soon disappear had sputtered over the past year as enterprises and ISPs found other ways to manage device identification and addressing.

“ISPs say customers aren’t asking for [IPv6], and you can’t expect ISPs to deploy when customers aren’t asking for it,” he said. And why aren’t customers demanding their providers switch to IPv6?

“Because they believe they are already connected to the Internet. We must disabuse them of that notion.”

To Curran, IPv4 is not the Internet, users’ claims notwithstanding.

“You are connected to a subset of the Internet,” he said of those users that believe they’re fully Web-enabled.

“We have to begin to tell customers they are not on the Internet; they are paying to be on, but they need to be told they are not on the Internet unless they are on IPv6,” Curran said.

To be sure, Curran and ARIN have a vested interest in encouraging enterprises and ISPs to adopt IPv6. North American IPv4 addresses will be exhausted by 2015, and with millions of user devices and other Internet-aware gadgets slated to come on-stream in the next few years, IPv6 is the only alternative. But IPv6 adoption, at least in the United States, has been glacial. While a little more than a third of U.S. government websites are IPv6 enabled, only 3.7% of industry websites and 5.7% of educational websites are similarly supported, according to stats shared at the Summit.

And that doesn’t say anything about how few enterprises’ internal networks natively support the IPv6 protocol.

For better or worse, many ISP and enterprise executives remain reluctant to invest the time, money and resources necessary to migrate to IPv6. The protocol’s proponents, and there are many, understand this. But they also understand how critical it is for companies and carriers to embrace IPv6.

Not because it can handle as many addresses as there are grains of sand, as the saying goes. But because it will also usher in new services and new capabilities that U.S. businesses and ISPs will need to remain competitive in the years and decades to come.

IBM will likely jam Intelliden into its monstrous Tivoli IT management suite. I assume it will get folded into Tivoli’s vast armada of Change & Configuration products.  Or maybe it will be absorbed into the horde of Network Management & Performance products. It’s hard to tell. Just delving into those product choices is overwhelming. Trying to figure out where Intelliden gets placed among them is a task that’s beyond me.

I’ve been covering the networking industry for about two years now, and I don’t think I’ve ever been approached by IBM PR regarding the network management capabilities of Tivoli. Come to think of it, most of the Big Four IT management companies don’t seem to have me on their radar. Only CA actively sends me news on network management technologies.  On the other hand, when I wrote for SearchCIO.com I received pitches from Tivoli fairly regularly. Does that say something about IBM’s Tivoli strategy? Market and sell to CIOs, not network managers and network engineers.

Given the choice, would you buy your network management tools from one of the Big Four or from independent vendors like NetScout, SolarWinds, Fluke, etc. And what do you do when your favorite vendor gets gobbled up, whether it’s Intelliden by IBM or NetQoS by CA?

Late last month SolarWinds acquired Profiler, a storage and virtual server management software technology from fellow Texas vendor Tek-Tools for $42 million. The technology provides visibility across storage, servers and virtual server environments.

On his blog ManageEngine vice president of product marketing Girish Mathrubootham claims that SolarWinds has been on a buying spree in recent years, acquiring a handful of companies like Tek-Tools, Kiwi and ipSurveyor in order to add functionality to its flagship Orion product suite. Mathrubootham argues that this is the approach that the Big Four have taken, creating management platforms that are huge, complex and pricey. He says:

Acquiring disparate products and integrating them at a GUI level may provide short-term boosts to revenue, but it is exactly this kind of headache that customers hate when dealing with the Big 4. (And SolarWinds would know this better than anyone else )

It’s true that SolarWinds has been acquiring point tools that expand the visibility afforded by its network management and application performance monitoring platform Orion.  However, is SolarWinds really hoping to become a tool of choice to server admins and storage managers? SolarWinds says it is making these acquisitions in response to what it hears from customers. The roles in the data center are changing and the tools that support these roles have to evolve, too.

Sanjay Castelino, vice president of product marketing & product management at SolarWinds says it all comes down to virtualization. The migration of virtual machines to migrate from host to host requires network managers to look beyond their organizational silos.

One of the things we seeing within the IT organization is this need for visibility across the network, the compute infrastructure, virtual machines, storage and applications in the data center. We looked at the pieces that we have in that: We have the network piece and the application monitoring piece and some server and virtual machine monitoring. Storage was an important piece to add to that mix.There is an overwhelming demand from our customers to get visibility into network, storage and virtualized environments.

You’re starting to see that these folks are starting to work more closely together. You can’t say “I’m only going to be a networking guy and I don’t have to talk to my peers in servers and storage.” That’s going away. These people have to get shared visibility so that when they make changes on one they don’t bring down pieces of the puzzle in terms of delivering applications. The networking guys own the networking piece and the storage guys own the storage piece, but all of them are wanting visibility across their domains into the other domains because they aren’t siloed anymore.

Is SolarWinds truly morphing into one of the Big Four? Will we have to start calling them the Big Five? Given that Orion is still a product that can be downloaded online, the complexity that ManageEngine is warning about seems pretty far off.

Here’s a video where a couple of guys from Solarwinds showing how the product works.

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Basically, this tool works like a configuration wizard. You enter the parameters you want for the configuration of a class of switches, routers, etc. The tool takes this information and outputs a configuration template in   Command Line Interface (CLI) code, which you can then cut and paste into the CLI consoles on any of your network devices.

It doesn’t scale that well. If you want to configure 100 switches, you have to cut and paste the CLI it into each one. But if you have some sort of network configuration management tool, you can probably drop these templates into that. Solarwinds, of course, is suggesting you use its Orion Network Configuration Management tool to apply these templates across your network.

Also, if you go to Solarwinds’ online community for customers, Thwack.com, you’ll find that Solarwinds customers are sharing their own configuration templates generated by Network Config Generator. You’re free to grab them and tweak them as you like with this free tool.

Although these were findings from three years ago, the one thing that hasn’t changed on the network is that people are still on it. No matter how technology changes, your users will be there. They necessitate a network, yet break the security of it. Why? There are all sorts of reasons, some of which you can resolve.

How you ask? Our network user management guide explains. In it we highlight several problem user scenarios, from the make-it-so CEO to the Internet novice who doesn’t know the difference between the Internet and their website (yes, that was a The Website is Down reference). In these user profiles we determine their network threat level and how to mitigate their bad network behavior. But nothing could cover every user scenario. If you have a way of dealing with the 8th layer of the OSI model — people — let us know!

This week the IP for Smart Objects (IPSO) Alliance announced a certification and compliance program to ensure vendors release IP-based smart objects that interoperate. You may be thinking, what the h&%ll do I care about smart objects? What is a smart object?

Believe me, you should care. Smart objects are sensors and actuators that run in a range of applications from smart grid management to building automation. The IPSO alliance is hoping to accelerate the use of IP in these devices. That means that enterprise lighting systems, for example, can be networked into the LAN. Among the many use scenarios, facilities management systems will communicate to network managers when a system is wasting power without actual use. It is feasible that these systems could save enterprises as much money as greening data centers.

On a larger scale, IP-based energy and building management means that utilities will implement smart meters in enterprises and homes that will warn home base of outages and waste. These smart meters will be part of larger IP networks laid over utility grids. In addition to enterprise and consumer savings, regional governments will spend less, enabling them to direct money to other crucial projects.

Cisco has already moved in on the action with its EnergyWise software initiative. EnergyWise is embedded into Catalyst switches and used to control not only power within the network, but also on PCs and building control systems. So it’s no surprise that Cisco is a member of the IPSO Alliance, along with Ericsson, SAP, Sun Microsystems and Google.

All of this innovation may be exciting, but for network engineers it means the need to gain more skills (possibly even certifications), more responsibility and assuming an even greater role in every enterprise. As this happens, they will have to demand the manpower and support necessary to expand in this new direction.

In this video, Netscout’s director of systems engineering Eric Gray demonstrates the integration.

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Today the Wall Street Journal reports that SolarWinds has set the terms of its IPO today. It will ask for a share price of $9.50 to $11.50 and it will make 12.1 million shares available to the market. SolarWinds hasn’t announced the date that it will go on the market, but the Journal article noted that companies usually time their IPOs to occur about two weeks after they set their terms.

IDC has identified SolarWinds as having the eighth highest revenue share in the network management market, just behind such industry heavies as IBM, CA, HP and EMC.

I think part of SolarWinds’ popularity can be traced to its distribution model. Rank and file IT pros can download affordable products directly from the company’s website. Many of the network managers I talk to also say Orion is just easy to use and it does what they need it to do.

While I’ve been waiting for a network equipment vendor to come along an snap up the company, SolarWinds has been making some moves of its own. It recently filed an S-1 form with the SEC, an early step towards an initial public offering (IPO) .

According to its filing, SolarWinds has experienced strong growth over the last few years – revenue of $38.2 million in 2006, $61.7 million in 2007 and $93.1 million in 2008. The company has more than 80,000 customers, including 400 of the Fortune 500 companies.

This isn’t exactly the best time to go pubilc, but based on the financials it provided to the SEC, the company is performing well. It will be interesting to see how the market treats the IPO.

UPDATE: Got an email from SolarWinds PR folks. This S-1 filing is an update of a filing the company made with the SEC last year. So I jumped that gun in saying the company is moving towards an IPO. Looks like it’s simply keeping things in place for an IPO for if and when I decides to move forward… which would probably be when this bear market ends. That could be a long time from now.

As consumer-centric as Google initially set out to be, they just keep either building new useful enterprise applications or acquiring companies that do. This acquisition is a prime example; GrandCentral Communications “provides services for managing your voice communications,” according to Google’s blog entry.

GrandCentral’s pitch is this: “No matter how often you move, change jobs or phone providers, everyone can still reach you through the same phone number.” And the business advantage can be seen in that this technology would give enterprise workers more flexibility: If you miss a meeting or a call, you can listen to it through someone’s forwarded email. When you discuss ideas with your boss you’ll never have to take notes again or run the risk of forgetting an assignment.

But this advantage also comes at the price of having to pay much more attention to the words coming out of your mouth. Editing what you say can only happen inside your head. Once it’s out, it’s there to be heard — and recorded, and posted to a blog and turned into a techno song by Indaba Music users.

Yes, with GrandCentral.com a conversation can go from phone to public forum within clicks. They keep your phone call records in their database and you can forward them to your colleagues, post them to a blog and more. So unless you’re talking to someone in person, any mode of communication through a device may as well be a record of your intercourse.

Let’s not get forget the impact this has on server space and network bandwidth. As the network remains the central core that enables connections and communications, the converged network which carries voice and video traffic across IP networks, is all the more demanding. Some months ago, Cisco’s push for network convergence was said to broaden the role of network pros. But with corporate kings like Google vying for more enterprise voice and video, this is only the beginning of what networking professionals will have to deal with.

Now that workers can easily manage their voice accounts, you may be wondering who is helping network pros manage the voice data on their network. SearchNetworking.com created a workshop on how to manage voice performance on your network, dedicated to this very cause. And if there are any other management tools you’re looking for, let us help you find them and get organized.

On a side note about getting organized, GrandCentral’s FAQ section says “Google acquired GrandCentral because its communications services fit into Google’s mission to organize the world’s information.” That was “to organize the world’s information.” At least you don’t have that responsibility.

And for Google, who does have that mission, thank you for helping me find, through your search engine, these articles on ways you frighten the general public:

• From ABC News: Is Google Turning Into Big Brother?
• From Bill Snyder’s “Tech’s Bottom Line” blog: Google plays Big Brother
• From CSMonitor.com: Big brother isn’t watching – Google is

And believe it or not, there’s an entire website devoted to the topic: Google as Big Brother.

Thanks for reading, watching, and hearing…