Forewarned is fore-armed, it is time to act

Martin Longo, CTO of real-time identity firm Demandbase is on a mission. His briefing paper, “Transition to IPv6: Why Online Marketers Should Care. If you think it’s just IT’s problem, think again”is a wake-up call. Directed at marketing executives, the audience should be much broader. This needs to be a cross-enterprise discussion involving not just IT mangers but include all key enterprise decision makers. Attention should/must be paid. This will concern the very heart of the business and the impact will be felt first at the top stack of most organizations. 

First, for the uninitiated, IPv4 is the current regime used for routing the Internet’s packet traffic around the world. An interesting global administration structure allocates the 4,294,967,296 Internet Protocol (IP) addresses it can support. Why is there a problem?

With over 2 billion Internet users online around the globe today, hundreds of millions of devices flooding the market annually and an avalanche of more to come as literally everything is communications enabled for things like smart grids, telemedicine, security alerting, etc., we are fast exhausting IPv4 addresses. It is a can that can no longer be kicked down the road.      

Fortunately, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) foresaw this. It described, in Internet standard document RFC 2460, published in December 1998, IPv6 as the solution. IPv6’s use of 128-bit addressing translates into potential support for 2¹²⁸ (approximately 340 undecillion or 3.4×10³⁸) addresses. To get your hands around the number, it is the equivalent of every grain of sand in the world having multiple IP addresses, in other words exhaust will disappear as an issue. IPv6 also has a number of other niceties to facilitate making traffic routing more efficient. 

So to back up for a moment, since the late 1990s Internet administrators knew and planned for the day when we would run out of IPv4 addresses. They asked/strongly suggested that the industry start transitioning to Ipv6. The operative word is “asked.” 

For a variety of reasons —including the cost of transitioning since IPv6 to IPv4 and IPv4 and IPv6 addresses would need to be supported and translations made for a number of years—operators and device manufactures have dragged their heels on implementing IPv6, and IT departments have hence waited on their end. Reality is that even at this late date, and despite an IPV6 Day and global awareness campaigns, estimates are that less than 1 percent of Internet traffic is IPv6.

Lest anyone think this is a re-run from the technology sector’s Y2K scare that became a mostly a non-event, it is not. This is real. As Longo states, “This change from IPv4 to IPv6 is an unavoidable necessity.” He sees this unambiguous situation must be seen as a call action to marketing executives. Get together with your IT counter-parts and confront the challenges now before they become big problems later. Your Internet service, including transactional capabilities could be significantly disrupted.  Longo says that while risks of a real crisis are not “insurmountable with the right preparation,” he cites a recent report done by Ipswitch (News - Alert) that 88 percent of business networks appear to be unprepared as alarming. 

Time for questions and urgency on getting answers

The paper posits a series of questions for marketing executives to ask themselves and colleagues:   

·         Is your business one of those that is unprepared?

·         How should online marketers and their staff deal with this encroaching and important issue?

·         Should you be concerned that your online strategies will fall into the proverbial black hole if your vendors and internal IT departments don’t have their ducks in a row?

The reason this is a must read, is because Mr. Longo then provides not just a reality check on what could happen, but a detailed approach for marketing executives on what they need to know and do. In fact, despite what may seem like a doom and gloom portrait of a train wreck, the paper details how marketing decision-makers can turn the challenges of the IPv4 to IPv6 transition into opportunity. This includes taking advantage of the coming ability to provide multiple IP address to personalize all types of things and business practices that have traditionally been hidden behind one address.

Practical advice for marketers is given on subjects such as:     

• Easy steps to take right now, and how to look smart in discussions with IT and others:

o   Ask IT to help identify the parts of the marketing of the company that will be impacted by the transition

o   Catalog the  mission critical tools used that depend on IP addresses to enrich the discussion

o   Determine if  planned solution, if they exist, include the integration on both the browser-side or the server-side

o   Ask IT if they are IPv6 ready, and If not:

§ do they appreciate how this could  impact marketing and other critical corporate priorities

§ are workarounds planned to address those issues

• Making sure the transition milestones of the entire ecosystem for transitioning are well understood — hosting providers, networking equipment vendors, operating systems, Web servers, home-grown applications, and databases — so disasters that could hurt business will be avoided.

In an interview with TMCnet.com, Longo agreed with those predicting the transition is going to be “messy.”   He pointed out that, “services that rely on IP addressing for precision in their presentation of data, things like geo location and web analytic services which are the future of more targeted marketing, are going to see degradation. And, like the problems associated with Google (News - Alert) changes in its algorithms, troubleshooting the issue all the way through the ecosystem is going to be challenging, especially for those who are caught unaware. The nightmare scenario being frantic C-level calls as to where did all of the traffic come from and why don’t we know?

Longo shared some insight into what is not in the briefing paper, the change indexing, archiving and retrieving a regime of trillions of trillions of addresses is going to force the industry to come up with new ways for doing all of this, since the speed at which the data can be stored and mined will be critical. 

A final observation for marketing executives was that becoming educated and sharing that knowledge was critical. Not being proactive can only lead to future real-time problems, where for instance an online community administrator is unable to identify and validate where traffic is coming from. This means not just from value customers but from bad actors as well.

As stated at the top, this is an important read for marketing executives. They are the ones who stand the potential of being near the head of the line when throats could get choked, yet who also have untold opportunities to be heroes. It is equally important for their IT colleagues and virtually all C-levels across their organizations, regardless of their geographic location.   Now is the time to start talking.  

Peter Bernstein is a technology industry veteran, having worked in multiple capacities with several of the industry's biggest brands, including Avaya, Alcatel-Lucent, Telcordia, HP, Siemens (News - Alert), Nortel, France Telecom, and others, and having served on the Advisory Boards of 15 technology startups. To read more of Peter's work, please visit his columnist page.