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Thinking IT ThroughBy David YedwabTwo 2011 Wildcards for ITMany of my industry colleagues already havewritten extensively about the key issues, opportunitiesand developments that IT will likelyhave to address in 2011. (By the way, whatever happened to the first decade of the 21stCentury anyway?). However, I have seen littleon two issues that I believe may take significant IT time, resourcesand budget during 2011. Both may be viewed as largely exogenous toyour major issues of delivering quality services to your end users.The two issues are:• the imminent exhaustion of IPV4 addresses, and the need totransition to IPV6 addressing; and• the impact of the net neutrality decision of the FCC, and thelegal and political turmoil it is likely to cause to business IT plans.First, while your enterprise’s private address space behind yourfirewalls/NATs may likely be OK during the transition toIPV6, your network and your users do connect across a WANand the public Internet to other address spaces (customers,partners, etc.) that may be affected during the transition.Some key questions that need to be asked:• Have you been assured by your service provider(s) that noneof your critical applications nor any of your planned transitionsto public or private clouds will be affected?• Have you been assured or notified by your equipmentprovider(s) as to whether any of your routing or switchingequipment (hardware and or software) needs to be upgraded?• And, the third question, when must we do something?At least you should be sure that you have comfortable answers tothese key questions and have a plan in place to react, if you need to.Regarding net neutrality, the concern is really whether your serviceproviders (traditional telcos, ISPs, MSPs and cloud providers) aregoing to be providing consistent levels of service or are going tobe distracted over potential business model changes stimulated bythe net neutrality ruling (initially likely to be more smoke in legalchallenges). And will wrangling over the ruling delay the launchof capabilities or services that enterprises might desire? And finally,let us not forget that these same service providers also are channelsto market for the many solutions offered by the UC vendors aswell as likely candidates to be providing cloud delivery of services– will these activities be changed or delayed?Hopefully both these issues ultimately will amount to little more thansmoke, but certainly they’re worth asking about to be sure that theyare not wild cards that will disrupt your plans and programs. ITDavid Yedwab is a founding partner in Market Strategy andAnalytics Partners LLC (www.mktstrategy-analytics.com).Let TMC help you execute your next Webinar. Contact Joe Fabiano for details about how you can use the power of TMC publicationsand TMCnet to draw a large number of qualified attendees. 203-852-6800 ext. 132 or jfabiano@tmcnet.com14 INTERNET TELEPHONY ® February 2011 Subscribe FREE online at www.itmag.com