For a good part of the last decade, one could be forgiven for thinking that the field of networking was on the verge of getting left behind, as all the attention focused on the development of networked applications. Whether it was Google, providing the world with Web search, monetized advertising, and a host of applications, or Facebook providing both a social networking application and a platform for third party applications, or Amazon providing IaaS and basically creating the Cloud Computing business - everything interesting seemed to be happening outside the "core" of networking.
The revolution in IT today is not about some 3-letter acronym or protocol or API: it’s how computing is built, delivered, and consumed. The fragmented, $3.8 Trillion vendor-centric approach of the client server era is giving way – perhaps with some kicking and screaming -- to a new infrastructure, software, and application model that is developer/user-centric…one that is elastic, mobile and, said plainly, a whole lot easier to deal with. Say what you want about cloud, but we are not reassembling the mainframe. Cloud operating systems like OpenStack constitute all the critical aspects of computing, and thus foster and integrate innovation from a range of players.
