nanog mailing list archives

Re: What Should an Engineer Address when 'Selling' IPv6 to Executives?


From: "Mukom Akong T." <mukom.tamon () gmail com>
Date: Thu, 7 Mar 2013 13:50:24 +0400

On Thu, Mar 7, 2013 at 12:25 AM, William Herrin <bill () herrin us> wrote:


 For that, you need the help of a real cost analyst. That's what
they're for; they help organizations figure out a solid idea what
something will really cost before they start spending money. If your
organization is large, you may even have one on staff somewhere.


Point taken. Thank you.




Implicitly they'll also be looking for the answer to a fourth
question: Do you know WTF you're talking about? If you assure them
it's all peaches and cream with tiny costs and no opportunity cost,
the answer is, "no."

I believe if anyone who can phrase the "IPv4 Exhaustion Problem + IPv6
Solution" in very specific terms of the business model of the company
will
implicitly inspire confidence in execs that they know what they are
talking
about.

Your first paragraph loses the argument: the day has past when IPv6
could become a credible solution to the IPv4 exhaustion problem. Like
it or lump it, NAT was the solution to the IPv4 exhaustion problem.
Which the exec will learn when he chats up his computer literate buddy
before making his decision.


I don't think NAT solves the problem in a sustainable way. Sure for
managers that are already driven by short-term goals, that's fine however
in Africa, we are seeing situations where NAT just doesn't scale.
Specifically with the influx of submarine cables, the bottleneck has
shifted from 'available bandwidth' to 'NAT' (or strictly speaking NAPT)
capacity.



If you're an ISP or you make network software, this is a
straightforward case to make. There are public sources of IPv6
deployment rate data. You can presume that a similar rate holds among
your customers and that the customers who deploy IPv6 will disqualify
your product if the product doesn't work with IPv6.


Good point.



If your business isn't networks, you have a much harder case to make.
As another poster noted, the end of IPv4 is not on the radar yet. A
statistically insignificant number of people will change banks this
year over their bank's web site IPv6 reachability.


Thank you once again.


Regards,
Bill Herrin

--
William D. Herrin ................ herrin () dirtside com  bill () herrin us
3005 Crane Dr. ...................... Web: <http://bill.herrin.us/>
Falls Church, VA 22042-3004




-- 

Mukom Akong T.

http://about.me/perfexcellence |  twitter: @perfexcellent
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