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Power to the People

It's all about what the kids want. They want YouTube, they want Skype, they want to play Halo over the Internet. And when they grow up and start working in your company, they'll want the same things – well, maybe not the Halo part. As we've written about before, end users more and more are influencing IT department decisions. They clearly want certain applications and support for certain devices, but what do they want in their networks?

"What the students want from us is a dumb pipe. They just want us to provide the access and get out of the way," Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson told Cisco's analyst conference today. "One size does not fit all. You cannot serve all the interests of all the employees with one policy." Taken to its logical conclusion, that means many network managers would be out of a job. Unfortunately for end users and fortunately for the aforementioned network managers, it just doesn't work that way in too many big businesses, especially as brute force bandwidth can be expensive.

Many businesses need that intelligence in the network for their network to work properly. WAN optimization controllers are blazing hot, mainly because network managers need to keep performance up to keep end users happy and because packet latency doesn't die when you have a fat pipe. Things like quality of service and network management applications are thriving for very much the same reason, especially as VoIP becomes a common business application and video emerges over the next few years as a business force of its own.

If and when bandwidth prices fall through the floor, as they've been hesitant to do recently, some of the need for advanced network management tools might decrease, as might the need to assert controls over bandwidth hogs like Skype and YouTube. Tools should also emerge that will enable much more selective control over how, where and when certain networked applications are used and behave. Plus, as Cisco SVP Mike Volpi said during the same panel as Anderson's comments, "The notion of ubiquitous and plentiful varies over time. At all times, and even today, we are fighting with the availability of bandwidth."

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