In "The Next Tech Boom is Underway," Greg Ness says it may be something much more prosaic and fundamental than the clean tech startups attracting so much venture capital money these days:

"Until the current network evolves into a more dynamic infrastructure, all bets are off on the payoffs of pretty much every major IT initiative on the horizon today, including cost-cutting measures that would be employed in order to shrink operating costs without shrinking the network.... even with the simple act of managing an enterprise network’s IP addresses, which is critical to the availability and proper functioning of the network, expense and labor requirements actually go up as IP addresses are added. As TCP/IP continues to spread and take productivity to new heights, management costs are already escalating.... If something as simple and straightforward as IP address management doesn’t scale, imagine the impacts of more complex network management tasks, like those involved with consolidation, compliance, security, and virtualization.

....The cloudplex will utilize racks of commodity servers populated with VMs that can scale up as needed in order to save electricity and make IT more flexible. That makes incredibly good sense, but are we really there yet? No.... For the network to be dynamic, for example, it needs continuous, dynamic connectivity at the core network services level. Network, endpoint and application intelligence will all depend upon connectivity intelligence in order to evolve into dynamic, automated systems that don’t require escalating manual intervention in the face of network expansion and rising system and endpoint demands."

The article as a whole goes into more depth concerning these challenges, as well as some potential winners in this race. Is this the next tech boom? And is it really underway?