Get on the Right Curve!

A treat at the Citrix analyst meeting was talk from Geir Ramleth, the Bechtel CIO and a Citrix customer. Ramleth described the fascinating saga of Bechtel's modernization of their IT infrastructure. As Bechtel was contemplating how to get from where they were to where they wanted to be, they came to the realization that big Internet players bought bandwidth on an entirely different price scale from giant Bechtel, and that Internet storage providers had a cost structure that bore no resemblance to the enterprise storage prices they paid. Geir reasoned that almost all of the VC IT investment was aimed at the consumer side (and presumably the innovation) and that if he wanted to really make progress he needed somehow to get off the enterprise IT curve and onto the consumer Internet curve. The details are pretty interesting but we're sworn to secrecy.