GigaOM

Yesterday, while I was returning from San Francisco to Austin, AT&T was letting folks know that it plans to move its headquarters from San Antonio to Dallas. A big part of the blame was laid on the lack of direct flights to other big cities, a fact I could appreciate after my indirect, 6-hour journey home. Ironically, as technology (powered in no small part by AT&T ) allows us to innovate anywhere, the financial woes of the airline industry that lead to fewer routes make it much more productive for those who travel to live in large cities.

Sure the relocation affects only 700 out of about 6,000 jobs, and from a technology perspective, the loss of the executive and upper management jobs won’t change much for San Antonio. Few tech startups (sorry Rackable Rackspace) are located in the city. The company’s former SBC Labs (now part of AT&T Labs) is in Austin where its usability center and rows and rows of test equipment live. It also had a large presence in Dallas where many of its equipment vendors have their U.S. headquarters and offices. Continue Reading

Have venture capitalists been ignoring infrastructure investments? A panel moderated by Paul Kedrosky says no way, it’s just not sexy to talk about. The panel features:

• Rajeev Batra, Pricipal, Mayfield
• Tom Dyal, Managing Director, Redpoint Ventures
• Maha Ibrahim, General Partner, Canaan Partners
• Allan Leinwand, Partner, Panorama Capital
• Vivek Mehra, General Partner, August Capital

Kedrosky: Is infrastructure on the outs for VC?

Panorama’s Leinwand: I would argue with the premise of the panel. VCs are funding infrastructure—when it’s right.
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Jonathan Koomey, a researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Labs and Stanford University, examines the world of bits meets atoms — or the power of computing.

Here’s some notes:

Data centers are not only the computing equipment, but power supplies and backup generators. How big an issue is data center power? I approached AMD to look at historical data center power use. In 2005 data center use was 1 percent of world’s total electricity. Half of data center energy is for infrastructure equipment. US and Europe dominate data center power usage, but Asia Pacific is growing the fastest.
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The mid-market is the last great business application opportunity, says Zach Nelson, president and CEO of the recently IPOed NetSuite. (That’s his market, but he promises his presentation will not be too self-serving. We shall see!) The cloud makes it economical to reach the Fortune 5,000,000.

The cloud does not solve the problem of application integration, says Nelson. Things won’t all magically work together. The web is very good for loosely coupled things, and the business world needs very tightly coupled applications.

Just like software before it, there’s a world of hurt for traditional services companies based on cloud computing and the expectations of customers. Accenture, PwC and the like.

But no clear mid-market leader, and few examples of moving down market. When you’re talking about synchronizing data, suites win. (Self-serving check: did I hear a “suite”?)

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Lawrence Roberts, the founder of Anagran and a chief architect of the foundations of the Internet, has a mission: help control P2P file-sharing traffic, which makes up a massive 80 percent of Internet traffic, he says. “There are a lot of inequities in the current Internet system. . . . P2P isn’t the most efficient way to do things”

But as companies like his help us start to control the situation, Roberts says we should see the P2P hogs dying down over the next few years. That will allow for other services to have a better response time, and normal traffic will have more growth over 2 to 3 years.
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Jim Crowe, president and CEO of Level 3, is sick with the flu, so Buddy Miller, vice chairman, is stepping in.

Going through a little history: Company hoping to make a profit soon. In ’90s you could raise money but turmoil when the bubble burst. Level 3 was funded enough to last and see industry change.

Not long ago, communications was utility — today telecommunication’s function is to provide the standardized connections. View of the future is standardized connections to the cloud. Bandwidth as a commodity — “Oops, I used the ‘C-word’!” But communications services are a technical commodity — successful company must be low-cost provider since demand is unlimited.

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