Networking challenges: Ideas and opinions from Interop Unconference

David Spark reporting for Riverbed at Interop '09, Las Vegas, NV.

If you've never been to an unconference, here's the format - there is no format. Or rather, it's a very loose format. The one I sat in was entitled, "Let's talk about networks, WANs, and CDNs." So it turns into a giant geek rap session based on different topics.

The following are just some ideas and comments that came out of this discussion at the Interop '09 unconference:

• When asking, "Where should you invest in your network first," you need to first ask yourself "What applications are you delivering over that network? What are the demands they have that you need?"
• For one person's client, each department has its own budget for IT and they need to justify their own applications when they make requests to IT.
  
• Another person responded that he tested this budget flow with mobile devices. Whenever new cool smart phones came out, people always wanted one which became a budget and management nightmare. Now, people have to come with their own budget if they want a cool new phone.
  
• CFOs are becoming aggressively more involved in the IT budget discussion.
  
• Most people don't split their costs up across all the businesses.
• One woman didn't believe Interop's recent survey of 1,000 people that said 40% of companies are increasing spending. She did an informal survey of the group of 20 and none of us were increasing spending.
• Before you offer the service to your client (e.g. hosted VoIP), try it yourself for your own business so you have real world experience.
• The build it yourself or go for a hosted networking solution decision is based mostly on what expertise you have in house.
• One guy who has a series of Web application clients, spoke for them as a loose proxy. He noticed in repeat cases that when they were small they outsourced everything to keep costs down. But as they started growing rapidly, the outsourcing company couldn't keep up with their growing business demands. So they brought everything in house to their own data center.
• Seeing a shift from CapEx to OpEx.