By
Julie Bort
Network World, 04/29/02
We asked six luminaries how they view the network
industry's current state. Among observations about the industry's
performance in 2001 and predictions for 2002, they also had
these things to say.
Our six participants were:
Harald Alvestrand, a Cisco engineer
in Trondheim, Norway, appointed chair of the IETF in 2001, the first from
outside the United States to hold this post.
Howard Anderson, senior
managing director of venture capital firm YankeeTek Ventures, in Cambridge,
Mass.; founder of The Yankee Group; and teacher of entrepreneurship at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Scott Kriens, CEO
of No. 2 worldwide router maker Juniper Networks, in Sunnyvale, Calif.
John McAdam, CEO of
Seattle-based traffic management software maker F5 Networks, whose stock price
tumbled with the 2000 Internet crash, but bucked the trend and nearly tripled
in 2001 from the mid $5 range to the mid $20s.
John Nallin, vice
president of IS for user behemoth UPS, in Mahwah, N.J.,with a $1 billion tech budget.
John Patrick, long-time
IBM Internet guru (retired to consultant status in December 2001), chair of
think tank Global Internet Project, and author of the best-selling Net
Attitude.
Harald
Alvestrand
On cooperation among international standards organizations:
"[The IETF and ITU] are managing to
cooperate and that's encouraging. Nobody would have predicted that 10 years
prior. Some people were predicting that the IETF would go away and other people
said the ITU would go away, but no one predicted that we would work together."
On globalization:
"We are getting away from the situation
where you could make standards by thinking that you were only making them
for the American market. It hasn't made sense for a long time, although
some people thought it did. But we have to be global, there's only one world."
On how the Internet influences globalization:
"One of the revelations that the Internet
has taught us is first, you start cooperating. Then you discover what time
zone you are [all] in, then you discover what country you [all] are in."
On IETF participation:
"The absolute number of companies involved
[in the IETF] has become smaller. A lot of smaller companies that participated
in the past have gone under, been bought up by larger companies or simply
can't afford to be there anymore. It is also part of the maturing of the industry
that there aren't huge new markets being opened by standards action.
That also means that there aren't huge markets being lost by lack of standards
action."
On the politics of making standards:
"I started out in the IETF in '91 with
MIME e-mail, which was about people coming together with lots of ideas and
then rolling out something [completely different]. And the community
said: 'Yes that's a great idea, we'll just make a few gratuitous changes
[in our product] to what you had in the standard so that it's not compatible
anymore.' None of this is surprising. To a certain degree, standards
are more about people's willingness to go forward than they are about technology.
Without a champion, the process rarely concludes."
On Linux:
"Linux proves that even good ideas can get into trouble.
Linux is an example that lots of people working together can get things done,
but it's also clear that lots of people working together can get into cooperation
problems." To top
Howard
Anderson
On the fate of long distance:
"What we had not understood
two years ago is that the real enemy of long distance was not RBOCs, but wireless
companies. A tremendous amount of traffic is going to them. 'Free'
is very hard to compete against."
On new network applications and services:
"The new applications
are not going to happen, a lot of them are useless or just plain silly, like
using a wireless phone to buy Cokes from a vending machine." To top
Scott
Kriens
On globalization:
"There will be only one market, and that is the planet.
The concept of regional networking markets - eventually - will give way and
will be true of equipment technology companies and service providers.
On IP:
"The reason IP is so popular is that it is open around
the world. It inevitably cannot be denied."
On new network applications and services:
"It was clearly the intent of the industry to deliver
intelligent services and value-added services across the world to enable new
capabilities for users. That was certainly done on a small scale, but not
on a scale that was hoped for [in 2001]. ... We're talking about fundamentally
re-honing literally hundreds of billions of dollars worth of infrastructure,
which is carrying today almost a $100 trillion of services revenue.
That rededication is not going to be easy or done in any one year. To top
John
McAdam
On the effects of the economy:
"In spite of the capital spending reductions last year,
a lot of projects have continued [in 2002], but have at a slightly slower
[pace] than last year. Companies have kept an eye on competitive advantage
in the Internet."
On running a business in today's climate:
"Two to three years ago, the growth was so strong that
companies weren't running their businesses weekly. In the last 14 months,
we have focused our business weekly. Every Monday, we have a meeting. We look
at head counts - making sure the expenses are under control. We look at sales
forecasts, the number of boxes shipped and compare that to the same week of
the [previous three] quarters. We make sure we're on the upside of the graph.
We have a weekly forecast, look at the major opportunities won or lost, look
at cash flow, cash collected. It's amazing to me, even with some of the high-profile
[accounting] things going on - that companies seem to avoid cash."
On the requirements of enterprises:
"One of the big things we did was to shift our selling
[efforts] from dot-coms to the enterprise. There's a number of things you
need to do [for that]. You need to have a good financial record, a great cash
position with no debt, the P&L efficiencies. You need global reach partners.
But you also need customers that use [the] products in significant ways,
and you need customer satisfaction [percentage] levels in the 80s or 90s -
that's what the enterprise expects."
On security:
"At some stage, I see the whole Internet encrypted.
That [could] take two or three years." To top
John
Nallin
On capacity planning:
"Right now we're buying servers that can come
with twice the capacity we need, and if we put 'em on the floor and don't
use [the excess capacity], we don't use it, and if we need it it's there.
I'm sure that if capacity on demand becomes more prevalent - which I'm sure
it will - it's going to be a whole different ballgame."
On the storage market:
"If you talked to us five years ago, we would have said
that IBM is our standard for DASD [direct-attached storage device.] If you
talked to us two years ago, we would have told you we don't use anyone but
EMC. Today, we'll tell you we have two vendors, IBM and EMC for our DASD. It's a never-ending cycle. When EMC
was on the low end they did things to entice you to buy their product. When
they were on the top end, IBM discovered that if they didn't do something,
they would lose business, so they produced a better product. It's leapfrog.
And storage-area networks is an opportunity for someone else to jump in."
On post-dot-com era expectations:
"With the fallout from the Internet [crash], the optimism
that everything's going to take care of itself certainly has changed. Things
that - I wouldn't say we were promised - but that we perceived were
going to be available, this unlimited bandwidth, immediacy of everything,
did not materialize."
On the pain of vendor management:
"Every [vendor] wants to be a partner. I want a partner
that I can really trust and that has my - and my company's - best interests
in mind. If that's the case, I am willing to accept compromises on certain
things. It becomes too difficult when you have a large environment and you
are counting on someone and they don't come through, for whatever reason.
In a lot of cases, they are not doing that intentionally, but they may know
more about the risk [of their product, service or timeline] then they are
willing to tell you."
To top
John
Patrick
On how 802.11 mirrors the Internet:
"I was riding through Bridgefield, Conn., a little New England
town of 20,000 people, and stopped at a Subway to get a sandwich.
I had my ThinkPad and read some e-mail. I had just returned from
a conference where I talked to Sky Daton, the guy that started
Earthlink. He has a new company called Boingo
[Wireless] with software that picks up 802.11 signals and lists
them.
"So I bring up the Boingo client and boom, there's a
signal. I bring up a browser and I go to DSLreports.com. I'm getting
1.2M bit/sec. I download e-mail, start my IM client and chat with
my son. I'm saying, 'How cool is this?'
"This is not only cool, it is profound. This is exactly
where we were in 1992-93 with the Internet. I was giving speeches
then saying we are going to do everything on the Internet and
people would say, 'John, you don't understand. It's not secure.
It's not scaleable. It doesn't have encryption or authentication.
It's unreliable. It doesn't work everywhere.' This long list of
objections. Now I'm talking about 802.11, and I hear, 'Yeah, but
it's not secure, not reliable, not available everywhere, etc.'
and I say, 'Hey, I've heard this tune before.' "
On 802.11 security:
"So what are the key problems [with 802.11]? Security
is the thing everyone brings up. Well, WEP [Wired Equivalent Privacy] does
have some shortcomings, but they are well understood - encryption technology
is well understood. And there's a [federal government] working group releasing
a standard [called] advanced encryption services, which is 128-bit."
Related links
Howard Anderson's "Yankee Ingenuity"
An archive of Anderson's Network World columns.
This year I'm definitely going to . . .
Consider these money-saving projects recommended by your peers.
Network World,
01/07/02
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