I just read a press release that was titled “USA Takes Lead in IPv6, Next-Gen Internet Equipment Certifications” The important thread of the release is that now, with pushes by the various Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) - ARIN among them, an increasing number of US companies are receiving IPv6 Ready Logo certification, thus jumping on the IPv6 bandwagon. Here is an excerpt from the release:
“As of August 2008, the U.S. has 68 Gold certified products compared with 53 from Japan (2nd place), 23 from Taiwan (3rd place) and 19 from China (4th place). The total number of IPv6 Ready gold certified products worldwide is 181. [snip] “Since it takes up to 2 years to migrate to IPv6, ARIN (America Registry for Internet Numbers) and RIPE (Reseaux IP Europeens), respectively the U.S. and EU organizations in charge of IP address allocation, have warned all organizations in their regions to start migration immediately, or face unnecessary costs and disruption,” said Luis Gopez, CEO of InfoWeapons. “This urgency is finally leading U.S. companies to invest in IPv6 product development and service deployment.”” So this made me think a bit about my own experience with IPv6 and the marketplace. I’m familiar with the IPv6 Ready Logo program (www.ipv6ready.org). It provides a framework for baseline IPv6 capabilities definition and interoperability. It originated as a program of the IPv6 Forum (www.ipv6forum.org) and had input from a global array of IPv6 technical experts to develop the standards and tests. While it serves as a defacto standard globally, it is not a “sanctioned” certification by NIST or JITC (although both reference it and there is a fair amount of cross pollination).
In my own experience over the past 5 years, the big IT vendors – companies like Cisco, Microsoft, HP, Symantec, Juniper Networks, and others have been implementing IPv6 support into their products. But during my OMB5-22 work with various government agencies, actual IPv6 implementation was severely hampered by a lack of feature and function parity for IPv6. That is, I could route IPv6, but I couldn’t adequately secure that traffic, monitor that traffic, or have many of my essential network functions work in an IPv6-enabled world. So despite the DoD directive towards IPv6 as well as the OMB 5-22 directive, much of the IT vendor community hadn’t really done anything to facilitate significant integration.
So why would an announcement by ARIN about the impending depletion of IPv4 address spur the US vendor community to IPv6 integration by seeking a logo that has no real sanction by the biggest adopter of IPv6 in the United States – the government? Is it fear of the upcoming IPv4 address exhaustion? Is it fear of not being able to sell to the US federal government? The answer to both is a resounding no. It is good old fashioned capitalism! United States vendors are recognizing the market for IPv6-enabled products in the Rest of the World (RotW), which collectively, is far more lucrative than the US marketplace. Anecdotally I can provide evidence to this position. In the past few months I was working with a client who was interested in adopting IPv6 into their product line. In the process of discerning their motives for doing so, US federal purchase requirements were one driver. However, it turns out over 45% of their total sales were in the RotW – with a large share in Asia. And that percentage was growing.
“So what?” you might say. Well, follow my logic here. It is a global economy. Economies grow and fall based upon their ability to be competitive or hold advantages over other economies. The US has always been a leader in the IT world, but we’ve always had the lion’s share of IP resources. The RotW can use IPv6 to catapult ahead of the US market place, thus diminishing a competitive advantage. The US, over the years, has given up leads in consumer electronics, automobiles, heavy industry, manufacturing, and some agricultural areas. So can we afford to lose networking technologies as well? I’m glad to see that US companies are topping the list in terms of total certifications. But second, third, and fourth place are all held by companies in Asia. So let us hope that we see a continued sense of urgency from US IT vendors.