Bechtel’s Fred Wettling has heard the often-quoted refrain that U.S. corporations aren’t moving to the next version of IP – but he doesn’t buy it.
“A lot of companies have some level of IPv6 going on, they’re just not advertising it,” says Wettling, manager of IT strategy and standards for Bechtel. His job is to investigate emerging standards and protocols to decide which are right for the $17 billion global contracting company. Having identified IPv6 as a “business imperative” for the company, Wettling is not only advertising Bechtel’s ongoing upgrade, he’s had baseball hats made up with “IPv6 Ready” logos to help promote the project within the company.
While Wettling says getting Bechtel’s upper management to approve the IPv6 migration has been more about education than arm twisting, few companies will talk of concrete plans regarding the protocol. For example, aerospace giant Boeing, which like Bechtel is a member of the North American IPv6 Business Council – conceived to foster the upgraded protocol’s adoption among U.S. businesses – declined to discuss its IPv6 plans.
IPv6 is far from a top priority among network executives. Despite its purported benefits – expanded address space, and improved security and information routing – the cost of upgrading hardware, software and applications, not to mention training, has kept the transition on the back burner at most organizations. Even IT executives inside the federal government, which has imposed a 2008 deadline for moving to IPv6, bemoan having to shuffle technology priorities to afford the transition.
“Right now our standard advice for typical enterprise clients is ‘Don’t do it,’ ” says David Passmore, research director with Burton Group, about IPv6. Despite Bechtel’s good business case for going to IPv6, Burton Group maintains there are no technical advantages to upgrading at this point.
Crazy is as crazy does
“The only people we’ve run across who might have real technical justification for going to v6 are parts of [the Department of Defense] for automated battlefields. . . . To anybody else I’d say ‘You’re crazy,'” he says.
At Bechtel, however, the business case for moving to IPv6 was strong enough to sell executives on the idea.
The engineering, construction and project management company lays claim to some impressive and varied projects, such as building the Hoover Dam, the Hong Kong International Airport and the original Sprint PCS network.
Three business units within Bechtel serve customers that view IPv6 as strategic, Wettling says. A unit that focuses on the U.S. government with its 2008 deadline – and with the Defense Department moving even more aggressively to IPv6 – is a key one. A division devoted to wireless carriers that look to Bechtel to build out their networks is another. Especially because IPv6 is required by the IP Multimedia Subsystem, a standard designed to deliver voice, data and video to mobile devices, toward which many wireless service providers are moving. The third unit is in control systems – sensors that detect light, temperature or humidity, for example, which are involved in keeping a building running. These are moving from proprietary networks to IP and could benefit from IPv6’s increased address space, Wettling says.
What’s more, many of Bechtel’s customers are in areas such as China that are more aggressively adopting IPv6 than U.S. businesses, he says.
These drivers led to the decision that Bechtel needs to move forward with IPv6, with a target date of 2008 for completing the transition (see graphic). Although Wettling has been aware of the protocol since he learned about it at an Interop conference session in 1997, this year he managed to get the company’s senior executives signed on, and a plan is in place.
Getting to the point of corporate acceptance was really about education, Wettling says. For the last few years, he’s been in conversations with CTOs and CIOs of the company’s business units about the importance of transitioning to IPv6 and making it a technical competence of the company. “Providing technology trend information relevant to our work allowed the business leaders to make informed decisions about the importance of IPv6 to their customers,” Wettling says.
Informing business leaders about technology is now an official part of his responsibilities; last month he was named a Bechtel Fellow, one of only 18 out of 40,000 employees, focusing initially on networking and security.
In addition to making the business case that some of Bechtel’s key customers, partners and competitors are transitioning to IPv6, Wettling needed to show the company how this upgrade would be internally beneficial.
Specifically for Bechtel, IPv6’s promised end-to-end security and heightened mobility features will play a large part in keeping the company’s many offices and field workers connected, says Alan Materna, Bechtel’s IPv6 project manager.
Wettling spread the IPv6 message internally during “tech talks” with members of the company’s IT department. Wettling wasn’t faced with much opposition, he says, but issues have arisen regarding prioritizing resources. “The resistance has to do with where to fit [the upgrade] into the list of priorities,” he says. “There’s no dispute within Bechtel that we have to do this, it was just a matter of when.”
A matter of course
Working in Wettling’s favor is that much of the transition to IPv6 will be done as a matter of course. “There are so many aspects to this transition that are just a part of what we do with the regular network; router upgrades,” he says. So as the company does routine upgrades of its routers, operating systems, applications, PCs and servers, IPv6 will be automatically a part of that as vendors include the new protocol in their offerings – Wettling says many, including Cisco and Microsoft, already do so.
“For each vendor we’re taking a look at their products to see what [aspects of IPv6] they support now and what they’ll support in the next release. It’s just part of planning.” Because much of the transition to IPv6 will come with regular product upgrades, the dedicated costs for the project consist of an undisclosed amount for project management and upfront implementation planning and architecture, Wettling says.
Enterprise applications are a bit trickier, however. “It’s still a challenge for us to design and implement or acquire applications that are relatively insensitive to underlying infrastructure changes,” Wettling says. He’s not too concerned, however. “We’re not taking anything away, we’re just adding v6,” he says.
Ensuring Bechtel’s key applications run in this new environment is up to Bechtel’s software quality assurance department, which will test all applications modified to work with IPv6, says manager Steve Bettinger. “We have to physically go in and alter applications to go to v6,” he says. “Most of our testing will be to verify [they run] on the migrated infrastructure.”
Currently there are about 1,600 applications running at Bechtel; the company plans to modify and test what it considers its 50 most strategic programs by the end of 2006. “Hopefully when we get to that point we’ll be able to really understand what it takes to get [the rest of the] applications tweaked” for IPv6, he says.
Although moving to IPv6 will take time and coordinated effort, Wettling says in the grand scheme of things it’s not a major ordeal. “We’ve gone through network protocol conversions over and over again – this is just another one,” he says. “Organizations like ours that have solid change management in place are going to have a better transition to v6.”
While some might believe Wettling is sticking his, and Bechtel’s, neck out by forging ahead with IPv6 when most businesses won’t even consider it yet, Wettling believes the transition will not be the monstrous headache and expense that many are predicting. In addition, he believes such moves are required by forward-thinking organizations.
“I find the lack of knowledge and vision by some about networking technology evolution both humorous and sad,” he says, adding that those are the same people that scoffed at TCP in the early 1970s and the first Web server in the early 1990s. “I’m sure the skeptics and laggards will achieve their goal of `no change’ for a while longer while the rest of us move into the future.”
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