Trends at the top of the enterprise stack are changing the balance of power down in the network, driving the emergence of new challenges that will fall on the shoulders of tomorrow’s practitioners and business leaders.  To prepare the next generation, a group of industry pioneers  have banded together to create the Peer 2.0 Foundation, an educational nonprofit that invited  theCUBE to its recent inaugural conference in Palo Alto to help spread the word about the  tectonic shifts to come.

“One of the things that’s important about this event is that the networking business is changing,” SiliconANGLE founder observed to co-host Jeff Frick in their opening segment for the two-day event. The market is going through a once-in-a-decade transition that is not only reshaping the technology landscape but the competitive playing field as well, and not necessary for the better.  “We’re seeing a huge changing of the guard between who runs these big networks, Comcast and Time Warner are in a merger situation, if they control access to the Internet we might not see the next Netflix, we might not see the next Google,” he warned.

Peer 2.0 aims to equip the future engineers and managers entering the workforce to overcome the many obstacles that will come with the new paradigm of networking  and exploit the opportunities set to open in conjunction. The old guard is passing its knowledge along.

“It’s nice that the guys who pioneered a lot of the innovation, founded a lot of the early companies like Equinix, are now providing the education and giving back to the next engineers that are coming up through the system who will help us define what the future holds,” Frick commented.

That grassroots focus has garnered the support of LinkedIn Corp., Avaya Networks Inc. and several other sponsors with a vested interest in smoothing the transition and eliminating the network as a bottleneck to value-added services higher up the stack. “The acceleration of pressure that the networks guys are feeling for innovation from the rest of the market is interesting,” Furrier highlighted in a follow-up session with Frick. ”Traditionally the network has enabled innovation on top of it but now the mode seems to be flipping around and innovation is going to be dictated to the network form the top of the stack.”

Also sponsoring the event is IIX Inc., a peering startup led by Equinix co-founder Bill Norton that operates Internet Exchange Points, or IEPs, which enable organizations to exchange traffic with one another to reduce infrastructure costs. The firm recently closed a $10 million funding round led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) that Furrier views as validation for the Peer 2.0 mission and the market as a whole.

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