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.

Photo credit: RMv6TF

Over 500 attendees join the 2013 North American IPv6 Summit today — the highest in the conference’s history. The Rocky Mountain IPv6 Task Force (RMv6TF) in conjunction with the Regional North America IPv6 Task Forces are throwing a three-day long conference, April 17-19, dedicated to the next generation of the Internet: IPv6. First-day attendees get a day-long tutorial and hands-on experience for a chance to tinker with a real live IPv6 environment. The following days feature educational talks from IPv6 super-stars, like Google’s Latif Ladid and ARIN president John Curran. These experts and many others are experienced in the ways of the new Web. Attendees are joining for lots of reasons, but mainly, not to get left behind in the ever-evolving IT industry. With the depleted pool of IPv4 addresses and IP-enabled devices entering the market, the time to know about IPv6 has never been more crucial.

Bring-your-own-application, or the “BYOA” trend is demanding a wireless LAN prepared to handle not just new devices, but the slew of new applications being brought into the workplace. Aruba Networks has recently announced a new wireless LAN platform with Aruba’s AppRF technology — a series of three mobility controllers, the 7210, 7220 and 7240 — aimed at addressing the onslaught of mobile applications and devices coming onto the enterprise network.

“Our customers were coming to us and saying, ‘we have a problem not being able to control the applications running on our employee’s mobile devices on our network — We don’t want to block them, we just want to know what the biggest bandwidth consumers of Wi-Fi are,’” said Ozer Dondurmacioglu, Aruba’s director of product and solutions during a briefing.

And while IT has been able to manage WAN bandwidth consumption, Wi-Fi bandwidth has been a different story.

“For Wi-Fi, everything changes as devices move around, and we wanted to help with capabilities to show [IT] what is going on in the air,” he said.

Enterprises will be able to eliminate desktop phones, IP PBX support, expensive video and audio equipment and dedicated videoconferencing systems thanks to the new platform, which can guarantee high quality and performance for popular voice, video and Unified Communications (UC) applications, like Microsoft Lync,  Dondurmacioglu said.

“The new normal is users love their mobile devices — they wouldn’t want to use anything else, even if IT begs them,” Dondurmacioglu said. “This year is going to be a battle between how to manage mobile apps over the air, and how to manage what is most important to an organization is protected given the limited Wi-Fi bandwidth.”

According to a SeekingAlpha.com transcript of the earnings call, CTO David Stevens said sales of the VDX switching line are accelerating and expanding. In the first year the technology was on the market, Brocade saw mostly pilot projects, but “now we’re seeing a fair number of those accounts scale out into broad production use of the technology. In fact, some of the customers [are] hitting the limits of” the original VDX architecture.

Brocade announced the VDX 8770 chassis switch this year to increase the scale of the VCS fabric.  The company now has 800 VDX customers.

“Over time, we’re going to see more scale-out production use of the technology, both… within [the] installed base where we sold the product to date but also as we gain new name accounts going forward,” Stevens said.

In its final quarter for fiscal 2012, Brocade reported $578 million in revenue, a 5% bump year-over-year.  It was a record quarter for the company, driven mostly by a robust sales in storage area network (SAN) sales. Its IP networking business declined by 3%, pushed down by routing. Switching actually grew by 5%.

During the earnings call one financial analyst, Mark Sue of RBC Capital Markets, pushed Brocade’s executives on the idea that it should focus its Ethernet business in the data center, saying “the business might benefit from some focus… Is there some thought of driving that deeper into the data center and perhaps less in the campus and less in the enterprise just because the market doesn’t seem to be growing that margin? It is very crowded.”

Jason Nolet, VP of Data Center Networking Group, said Brocade has invested substantially in its VCS fabric and its VDX switches. Investments in campus networking aren’t taking away from that data center focus, he added. Stevens, the outgoing CTO, added that investments in campus networking are relatively small compared to the investments the company has made in developing VCS and service provider networking.

Brocade started refreshing its campus networking products a year ago with the ICX 6610 series. Next year it will release HyperEdge, a campus LAN management technology that establishes a single management IP address where admins can make changes to an entire network through a single CLI session.

Stevens added that customers are starting to engage with Brocade about the need for software defined networking technology, especially for implementing network virtualization.

“I think it’s starting to gain a lot of interest,” he said. “When you think about adding another layer to the network with network virtualization, you’re going to add logical networks through tunnel technology. You’re actually adding to the overall administrative burden of that environment, because the physical infrastructure doesn’t go away. It still needs to be scaled, maintained and managed to upgrade, et cetera.”

Customers are telling Brocade that the VCS fabric’s ability to “simplify and reduce the operational overhead of that underlying transport as a result of the very high level of automation and efficiency that we’ve built into the fabric” allows them to focus more on how they’re going to deploy and run network virtualization, Stevens said.

“It also prevents them from just doubling up their operational overhead as a result of having adding that additional virtualization layer to the network environment,” he added.

An eight-slot chassis will appeal to service providers and web-scale companies (Facebook, Google, etc.). Last year F5 introduced a down-market Viprion, the two-slot 2400, which is priced for companies that want something a little more flexible and powerful than the company’s fixed-configuration BIG-IP appliances. During the earnings call, McAdam said the Viprion 2400 is selling very well and he implied that the 4480 is seeing softer sales as service provider spending has dropped across the industry.

F5 will also introduce an “application delivery firewall” via an update to its ADC firmware, TMOS. McAdam said this firewall will integrate Layer 3 through Layer 7 security, “including the loss prevention and unique application fluency to prevent sophisticated application attacks.” This firewall will also include DPI functionality, although McAdam indicated DPI would be aimed mostly at service provider customers.

Ford is systematically trying to resurrect the Lincoln brand as a viable competitor to BMW, Audi, and Lexus. Unfortunately for Ford, the company has to do a lot more than simply build a good car that’s worthy of the price tag. The brand has been moribund for so long that it’s aged out of key demographics. People entering their thirties and just starting to earn enough income to think about buying a luxury car don’t think of Lincoln as an option. They’re looking at the brands that bankers, lawyers and Hollywood types are driving. Lincoln is not on that list.

I think tech companies can face the same challenge if they don’t keep their brands competitive. RIM is starting to develop a Lincoln problem with BlackBerry. Whole generations of smarpthone buyers are emerging who have never even held a BlackBerry. My two-year-old niece knows how to work the touchscreen of an iPhone or Android device. If you put a BlackBerry with a qwerty keyboard in her hands, she’d put it to her ear and say “Hello?” Then she’d throw it away and start playing with the iPhone again. That’s a heavy-handed metaphor for what’s happening with kids entering the workforce. In a BYOD world, how many 22-year-olds are going to bring a BlackBerry to work?

Postponing the BlackBerry 10 OS only compounds the problem. Some coupon web site with a silly name (CouponCodes4u.com) sent me some flash poll data aimed at gauging consumer reaction to the BlackBerry 10 news. The site polled 1,451 Americans aged 21-35. Twenty-one? How many 21-year-olds have even considered a BlackBerry?

No surprise that 29% of these people felt that BlackBerry products were not “as well designed or built” as they used to be. (Don’t young kids think that about most American cars these days?) And 59% of those surveyed said they didn’t own a BlackBerry. Why not? Well 52% of those who don’t own one cited the lack of personal and business apps, such as Instagram and Angry Birds while 53% also said that there “was nothing special” that the BlackBerry could offer them.  Does that sound like a Lincoln Town Car problem? It does to me.

RIM isn’t dealing with an “If you build it, they will come” situation here. Even if they get a great OS out to the market next year and it draws rave reviews from gadget blogs, there is no market for it. BlackBerry loyalists (those few who remain) will buy one, but you’re not going to win new customers from Apple and Android. It’s going to require more than a good product. Aaaaaand it’s going to require a brand revival. And I’m not talking about easy gestures like sponsoring the pre-game show for the NBA Finals or hiring Jennifer Lopez to drive around in a Fiat. It’s going to require a fundamental invigoration of the brand. Convince those pesky millennials that BlackBerry isn’t their granddad’s smartphone.

A similar supply chain crunch struck the wireless LAN industry last fall when a surge in orders for 802.11n enterprise wireless LAN gear caught many vendors off guard. Aruba was forced to push back a product announcement by a week, due to this shortage.

Now Cisco is dealing with its own unexpected surge in orders, and its supply chain is struggling to deliver.

Cisco helped create this supply chain disruption, according to Jerald Kolansky, of the consultancy Gerson Lehman Group and a former executive with semiconductor firm PLX Technology. Kolansky wrote on his firm’s website that Cisco cut orders for supplies drastically in the fall of 2008 with little warning for its suppliers. This forced suppliers to make drastic cutbacks of their own and they are now struggling to ramp up production again.  Kolansky wrote:

Firms such as Cisco have reaped what they sowed. If they had been more willing to share the pain and in fact had not overreacted in cutting orders they would not be in the situation they are in today.

But Foote Partners LLC, the IT workforce management consultancy, points out that the country has experienced four consecutive months of growth in the IT jobs market (PDF).

On its face, that sounds nice. Four months of jobs growth? The country would love to see something like that for all job categories. However, Foote notes that the country gained about 7,600 IT jobs in December. That’s not exactly an explosion of opportunities, but it is a flicker of hope.

Despite this job growth, it doesn’t look like IT departments are actually hiring. Foote notes that the Department of Labor stats are showing the most growth in two categories: “Management & Technical Consulting Services” and “Computer Systems and Design and Related Services.” This implies that the companies are bringing in consultants, contractors and managed services rather than adding new employees.

In short, my answer was “yes.” But in long, if the title of this blog post is any indication, I was quite taken aback by what I heard from Burton Group senior analyst David Passmore in his first session on the “wireless everything” era.

When I spoke to Passmore last week in an interview on computer networking trends for 2009, I hadn’t quite realized that his future of networks meant the extinction of them.

In the first point of our interview Passmore stated, “Wireless is one [networking trend of ‘09] because there’s an increased use of mobile phones for both data as well as for voice. We’re also seeing enterprises using wireless LANs (WLANs) often as a substitute for wired Ethernet.” From these trends, he suggested that we would some day no longer need networks.

Consider this tongue-in-cheek dialogue between Passmore’s explanation of this at Catalyst and the audience’s reaction:

Passmore: For longer-term networking trends, we may actually see the disappearance of enterprise networks.

Audience: Blank, saucer-eyed staring

Passmore: You’re probably thinking, “How can that be?”

Audience: Those not nodding vehemently to his question are doing so internally, thinking “Yes, how can that be?”

Passmore: Well, we’re already seeing a shift from wired Ethernet access for the use of wireless LANs.

Audience: OK, but that’s still a network — hence the “n” in wireless “LAN”…

All kidding aside — what he meant was that Ethernet is very surely being replaced with wireless, which will then be replaced by 4G mobile cellular data. Does this seem probable? I think he has a valid point, but how soon will a transition like this occur? Will the network engineer have to move into wireless telecommunications in his lifetime? Who’s to say?

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…