Stories by: Johna Till Johnson

Last year, IT budgets declined by 10 per cent to 20 per cent, depending on who you believe. Jobs were lost. And the pool of vendors is constantly shrinking, given the tsunami of bankruptcies and mergers over the past few years. (Adios, Nortel.)

In case you've missed it, someone recently dumped a large cache of e-mail files and documents from the University of East Anglia University's prestigious Climactic Research Unit onto the 'Net. The CRU is one of the leading climatology research institutions, and its data and models provide much of the infrastructure on which the theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is based.

Last week, I wrote about the possible implications of the new lineup of FCC commissioners. They certainly haven't wasted any time: On Aug. 3, the FCC launched a full-scale investigation into the decision by Apple and AT&T to reject Google's voice application for the iPhone. As Sanford Bernstein telecom analyst Craig Moffatt notes, "The issue of application suppression affords the Administration a back door route to Wireless Net Neutrality, something that has been openly espoused by new FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski."

Unless you've been living in a cave all summer like one of my friends (it's in Finland, he's an artistic genius) you've probably heard the buzz about cloud computing.

Many folks are familiar with the modeling we've done over the past few years highlighting the fact that Internet demand is outstripping capacity, specifically access capacity. The findings were, to put it mildly, controversial: We've been called everything from carrier shills to nut-jobs. (No, the research wasn't sponsored. And we never claimed your fillings were receiving extraterrestrial radio signals).

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, there were two basic models for selling IT: Equipment vendors sold hardware or software. Services vendors sold maintenance contracts, professional services or connectivity. And IT practitioners didn’t sell at all – they delivered infrastructure, applications and support that their organisations (hopefully) found useful.

Sounds like a crazy question, in this era of Facebook, Twitter and a "digital millennial" generation that's grown up never not knowing the Internet.

is having the ability – real or imagined – to “see around corners”. That is, to predict with some degree of accuracy that which hasn’t been invented yet.

A little over a year ago, my colleagues and I modeled current and projected Internet capacity and anticipated demand to see if the curves ever crossed. The short answer: Yes, sometime before 2012, access (though not core) capacity would no longer be enough to serve demand.

Many IT executives consider the WAN to be a monolithic entity: a giant network that connects all the organization's sites across a common infrastructure.