The Next Hot Thing: Infrastructure Companies
Are Internet traffic related infrastructure companies about to become all the rage (again)?
I was thinking today about YouTube, Photobucket, Imageshack, Slide, Google Videos, and all the other Internet services that are now gobbling up bandwidth like nobody's business. Not to mention MMO's, services like Real Networks video service that lets me download entire movies, and hosted (ASP) enterprise applications that are totally integrated with every business that has an online presence. One might wonder if the Internet is about to topple over any day now.
Of course, there are a lot of Internet infrastructure companies already in existence, Akamai and Cisco for starters. But seemingly overnight, or at least just in the past few months, the long-awaited promise of huge amounts of audio and video being transferred over the Internet has become a reality. A lot of people are focusing on end user services, applications, and so on. That space is definitely ripe for more offerings - Web 2.0 entrepreneurs are building amazing applications, tools, and sites in a matter of weeks.
But it may be time to focus once again on infrastructure. Infrastructure at the bandwidth level, and infrastructure at the software platform level, for building communities, handling transactions, and so on. One wave will be infrastructure at the software platform level (whether it arrives as actual software or as a hosted service, or both) -- and that is already happening. The other will be actual, hard-core infrastructure: boxes, hardware, etc.
I was thinking today about YouTube, Photobucket, Imageshack, Slide, Google Videos, and all the other Internet services that are now gobbling up bandwidth like nobody's business. Not to mention MMO's, services like Real Networks video service that lets me download entire movies, and hosted (ASP) enterprise applications that are totally integrated with every business that has an online presence. One might wonder if the Internet is about to topple over any day now.
Of course, there are a lot of Internet infrastructure companies already in existence, Akamai and Cisco for starters. But seemingly overnight, or at least just in the past few months, the long-awaited promise of huge amounts of audio and video being transferred over the Internet has become a reality. A lot of people are focusing on end user services, applications, and so on. That space is definitely ripe for more offerings - Web 2.0 entrepreneurs are building amazing applications, tools, and sites in a matter of weeks.
But it may be time to focus once again on infrastructure. Infrastructure at the bandwidth level, and infrastructure at the software platform level, for building communities, handling transactions, and so on. One wave will be infrastructure at the software platform level (whether it arrives as actual software or as a hosted service, or both) -- and that is already happening. The other will be actual, hard-core infrastructure: boxes, hardware, etc.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home