Broadband Developments

Broadband Developments blogger Greg Ness writes a guest post on Seeking Alpha today that basically asks the question:  Can cloud computing be as disruptive to changing the game as TCP/IP was?

TCP/IP fueld a entire generation of great companies as well as creating massive wealth for investors, entrepreneurs, and employees.

It’s a long article so bookmark it or take it to go with you.  It’s a good read.

Some higlights that I like…

We’ve seen this collision between new software demands and network infrastructure many times before, as it has powered generations of innovation around TCP/IP, network security and traffic management and optimization.

It has produced a lineup of successful public companies well positioned to lead the next tech boom, which may even be recession-proof.  Cisco (CSCO), F5 Networks (FFIV), Riverbed (RVBD) and even VMware (VMW) promise to benefit from this new infrastructure and the level of connectivity intelligence it promises.

Until the current network evolves into a more dynamic infrastructure, all bets are off on the payoffs of pretty much every major IT initiative on the horizon today, including cost-cutting measures that would be employed in order to shrink operating costs without shrinking the network.

Automation and control has been both a key driver and a barrier for the adoption of new technology as well as an enterprise’s ability to monetize past investments.  Increasingly complex networks are requiring escalating rates of manual intervention.  This dynamic will have more impact on IT spending over the next five years than the global recession, because automation is often the best answer to the productivity and expense challenge.

Cloud computing is dynamic computing power on a massive scale delivering new economies for IT services and applications.  In between those economies and the prices existing enterprises are already paying for their own services is the business case, in addition to operations, sales, marketing, and new infrastructure requirements.

As much as cloud computing has rallied behind the prospect of electricity and real estate savings, the business case still feels like a dotcom hangover in some cases.  Virtualization is still a bit hamstrung in the enterprise by the disconnect between static infrastructure and moving, state-changing VMs; and labor is the largest cost component of server TCO (IDC findings) and a significant component of network TCO (as suggested by the Computerworld findings).  So just how much will real estate and electricity savings offset other diseconomies and barriers in the cloud game?  I think cloud computing will also have to innovate in areas like automation and connectivity intelligence.

For the network to be dynamic, for example, it needs continuous, dynamic connectivity at the core network services level.  Network, endpoint and application intelligence will all depend upon connectivity intelligence in order to evolve into dynamic, automated systems that don’t require escalating manual intervention in the face of network expansion and rising system and endpoint demands.