KEY POINTS:
Note to self: don't take a job as a network engineer for a large internet company. It seems a stressful way to make a living.
When internet technology company Juniper Networks held a promotional event for media and analysts in New York last week, it called in a couple of its customers to share war stories about running businesses that rely on its whizzy inter-web gadgetry.
First up was Frank Ziegler, vice-president of communications at the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, the oldest equity exchange in the United States, established in 1790.
In the intervening years, financial trading has become a competitive, technology-dependent business. Ziegler said the Philadelphia exchange's systems need to read up to 650,000 market quotes per second, and trades are executed in thousandths of a second.
"If we have a service-affecting outage for 15 minutes, my boss needs to call the SEC [Securities and Exchange Commission] and we shut down the exchange," Ziegler said.
"This is a problem you never want to have happen on your watch, trust me."
A similar nightmare was played out a little closer to home last month when, as world sharemarkets were taking a dive, Australia's largest online broker, CommSec, crashed under the pressure of seller demand, leaving clients unable to sell as the market plunged.
Also at last week's New York event was Joel Lynch, chief network engineer at Turner Broadcasting's Digital Media Technologies division, which is responsible for running several heavyweight websites including CNN.com, the world's busiest news site.
Lynch said the reputation of a site like CNN.com depended on users' ability to access it quickly, including at peak times when big news breaks.
On the night of the November 2004 presidential election, CNN.com generated up to 500,000 page-views per minute. Lynch said comparisons so far suggested traffic would double to a million views per minute on CNN's results night for this year's election. These types of eye-watering numbers are good news for companies like Juniper, given its business is providing the technology "plumbing" - the electronic switches and routers - that make the internet work.
Juniper put on the event to announce a range of high speed switches it hopes will help grow its share of the business-network infrastructure market. It is a global market estimated by IT research firm IDC to be worth around US$37 billion ($47 billion) last year and is dominated by Cisco Systems.
Juniper chief executive Scott Kriens touted speed as the "new currency" of business. "What matters today in business is not the perfect decision but a quick decision," he said. The need for more speed across business networks is also being driven by several technology trends including the delivery of software-as-a-service and the growth of unified communications. Software-as-a-service involves users accessing the tools they need over the internet through their web browsers, rather than loading and running applications directly on their PCs.
I asked Turner Broadcasting's Lynch what the next technology challenge was for sites like CNN.com. He raised an issue all too familiar to New Zealand internet users: the bottleneck involved in getting web traffic across the "last mile" of the internet, from the internet service provider to their customers' homes.
Last-mile speeds have generated anger back here lately. If they don't improve soon I'll add Telecom NZ CEO to that list of jobs I'll refuse to take.
Simon Hendery travelled to New York as a guest of Juniper Networks
