Corporations Fail To Budget For Upcoming Bandwidth Boom

Nicholas Carr, author of The Big Switch and of IT Doesn't Matter states the information technology (IT) departments won't matter in the next few years as computing takes place on the Net, versus on the PC.

Will corporations be prepared for the upcoming bandwidth boom?

Enterprise bandwidth requirements will more than double in the next five years, yet budgets will only increase by five per cent, according to a survey released today.

The research, carried out by Omniboss - a division of market analysis firm Vanson Bourne - among 100 senior IT decision makers found a further one in five executives thought their bandwidth requirements were likely to grow by 150 per cent or more.

Nearly one third (30 per cent) believed voice over internet protocol (VoIP) and converging voice, data and multimedia technologies such as video on demand would also have a significant effect on traffic in the future.

The Big Switch...A Great Read

The Big Switch by Nicholas Carr does a great job of explaining how the real growth in computing is shifting from the PC to the Internet. The PC is becoming less important as the "processor".

This month's Wired magazine has a great quote from Amazon's Jeff Bezos that summarizes what Nicholas conveys.

Utility computing is Web 2.0's version of rocket fuel. "You don't generate your own electricity," Bezos says. "Why generate your own computing?" The forces driving online apps — Internet bandwidth and reliability — also mean that, in terms of data per dollar, servers in your closet or colocation facility can't compete with industrial-scale bits piped in from hundreds, even thousands, of miles away.


Intro to The Big Switch.

A hundred years ago, companies stopped generating their own power with steam engines and dynamos and plugged into the newly built electric grid. The cheap power pumped out by electric utilities didn’t just change how businesses operate. It set off a chain reaction of economic and social transformations that brought the modern world into existence.

Today, a similar revolution is under way. Hooked up to the Internet’s global computing grid, massive information-processing plants have begun pumping data and software code into our homes and businesses. This time, it’s computing that’s turning into a utility.