Web 2.0 & Death of the Network Engineer
GigaOM is running a great article today about the changing environment faced by network engineers - as high-performance, well-optimized Internet providers are becoming ubiquitous, and access to the Internet has approached commodity status, what is the relevance a network engineer plays in today’s new economy? The article raises the question of a network engineer’s place: is it primarily with the Internet service provider - ensuring service is available and customers have access (think a lineman for the telephone company) - or is there still a place for an experienced network engineer supporting a company’s customer-facing operations? As the article says, service-oriented Internet companies, providing services to millions of users, may no longer need network engineers on their staff to support these operations.
To this CTO, knowing the details of his network and server infrastructure was like knowing the details of the local utility electricity grid – not required. Is this a bad thing, or proof that networking technologies have succeeded?
The question posed is this: do companies building Internet-oriented products, Web 2.0 service companies for instance, need network engineers to keep their systems running? Or does it make more sense to outsource these kinds of operations to a third party (for instance, hosting everything via a virtual server or other hosting provider)?
If the answer to this is yes, then imagine some of the logical extremes: fat pipes leased by organizations (of the OC ilk, for instance) to handle their customer traffic is no longer necessary for anyone other than the hosting providers. Datacenters would have these kinds of connections while the corporate offices would have lower-end connections (I can see a popular Web 2.0 provider where employees run off a local DSL connection, while their hosting provider has a full OC-12 to handle traffic).
Of course, larger organizations with an IT support staff wouldn’t fit in this category, and companies with a large number of on-site employees requiring Internet access would still be leasing high-capacity connections, but it’s an interesting question nonetheless, especially as so many companies are moving their software offerings to subscription-based models. What’s your take?
