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

Thu Mar 7 09:50:24 UTC 2013

On Thu, Mar 7, 2013 at 12:25 AM, William Herrin <bill at 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 at dirtside.com  bill at herrin.us
> 3005 Crane Dr. ...................... Web: <http://bill.herrin.us/>
> Falls Church, VA 22042-3004
>

-- 

Mukom Akong T.

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