2008 Review

I feel somewhat obligated to do an end of the year post. It's in fashion, it's that reflective time of year, and well....why not. I've been saving up a bunch of items, so here we go.....

First - there have been any number of '2008 review' articles and blog posts, but here are some of my favorite year-end stories:

• MIT Technology Review: The year in Computing
• CIO Magazine: The Top 10 Cisco Stories of 2008
• Seeking Alpha: What's Next for the Colocation Sector?
• Data Center Knowledge - Top 10 Stories of 2008

The big story of the year (for me anyway) was the Iowa floods in June. I witnessed a lot during those few weeks/months and was very fortunate to not be directly affected. I saw both good and bad business continuity plans being executed and came out with a number of very valuable lessons learned.

I am a big picture person. I like to see the 10,000 foot view and then analyze the heck out of it to the associated impacts, outcomes and possibilities. A short while back I ran across a report from the National Intelligence Council titled Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World. Although I didn't read the entire 120 pages, here are some things that stood out to me:

• Page 33: ".... nine factors can contribute to a modern National Innovation System: fluidity of capital, flexibility of the labor pool, government receptivity to business, information communication technologies, private sector development infrastructure, legal systems to protect intellectual property rights, available scientific and human captial, marketing skills, and cultural propensity to encourage creativity."

• Page 40 has a an interesting map showing world population by age range, in 2005 and 2025.

• Page 63 has a chart breaking down likely energy sources (coal, gas, hydro, oil, nuclear, biomass, others) from 1980 to 2025.

In October I started tracking data center stocks a little closer. I created a Google spreadsheet and used the capitalization-weighted method to make an index of the stocks I chose to track. The stocks are all data center industry companies and I post regular updates for what the price is as often as I can. It started in October at $23.13 and closed today at $19.63

I have a few million feeds in my Bloglines account. I removed a couple dozen the other day and need to work on prioritizing what I read in there. My favorite new blogs that I am reading are:

• Stevey Clayton : Geek in Disguise
  
• John Gannon - Yet Another VC Blog
  
• Errata Security
  
• Microsoft Data Centers
  
• Gianpaolo's blog
  

This blog had a pretty good year overall....the biggest problem is just finding the time to sit down and write. Coverage of the Michael Manos speech at the Spring Data Center World conference was by far the most read post of the year. Much of this was due to a link from the popular blog by James Hamilton. I was happy to see that my Data Center Site Selection white paper from 2007 had the second highest number of visits. The top states that visited my blog (in order) were California, Iowa, New York, Texas, Washington, Illinois, Virginia, Massachusetts, Florida, Nebraska, and Wisconsin.

As many of you know, I live in Iowa and am a big advocate of the upper Midwest. Iowa had a lot of activity in 2008 with the Google data center in Council Bluffs, the Microsoft West Des Moines announcement and TEAM Companies making several announcements (opening Madison data center and breaking ground in Des Moines).

On to 2009!!

Data Center Containers were a huge story in 2008 and I think that will continue in 2009. I saw the Sun Blackbox again this year, and the Rackable Icecube at Data Center World. I have a number of posts in mind to review and analyze containers, but more on that later...

A few blog posts back I mentioned that video was going to be the killer app. While this is not any big revelation I realize, I think it has been a gradual thing that has many side affects and will continue to grow rapidly in 2009. I've read things about Cisco really attacking the home entertainment market, YouTube , Hulu , Joost , Vimeo and others had great years, and the infrastructure market to support video distribution is growing. The CDN market (I believe) is set to have a great 2009 and we may see some M&A action here. Video podcasts (or what ever you want to call them) are growing in number as well. Some of my regulars include:

• Cisco TechwiseTV
  
• TED Talks
  
• Google Tech Talks
  
• Hak5
  

Kevin Rose from digg.com cut the cord and ditched cable in favor of the Internet, TiVO and Netflix. TiVO recently announced that they will offer the ability to watch YouTube videos on TiVO. I got an iPhone about a month ago and have to say....it is the best cell phone I have ever had. I mention this because I discovered I could use qik.com on it and find the application and streaming video ability pretty amazing. The end result though....bandwidth is going to HAVE to get better in 2009!! More on this at the New York Times article about Internet usage growth.

Happy New Year!!!

Inspiration is for amateurs ; the rest of us just show up and get to work.
-Chuck Close