A Simple Comparison

For those that have been leaving comments, I first want to say I appreciate your time and energy. I read them all (both gruff and gracious).

But let me try to clarify a simple point.

I was talking to the CIO of a large financial institution last week. He told me he was in the midst of building out two new datacenters, spending $250,000,000 (yes, a quarter of a billon) on one, more than that on the other. He was beyond frustrated (as I'm sure was his CFO).

I asked him how long it was going to take, he said nearly three years. Years.

And then Dave Douglas reminded me that two to three years is longer than it took for YouTube to incorporate, build out their infrastructure, scale their business to serve the entire planet - and get sold.

So if time to market matters - in responding to market opportunity or a natural disaster - surely something's got to change. It's not as though datacenter's are at any risk of disappearing - like I said, there has to be a place to put network infrastructure - but no one could deny it's time for a tectonic shift in how we think about the problem.

Posted on 11:58PM Oct 15, 2006 | Comments[20]

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