This is part two in a series of interviews with Martin Levy, Director of IPv6 Strategy at Hurricane Electric

Hurricane Electric is one of those rare companies that have survived, and grown in the past two years. A private company, Hurricane Electric has become one of the largest Internet Service Providers in the world, and is a leader in IPv6 deployment. In this article Martin Levy shares a few ideas on how Hurricane Electric approaches their business and continued growth.

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I met Martin Levy for the first time in Honolulu at the Pacific Telecommunications Council '2007 conference. After several coffees at the Kalia Tower, and an hour or so discussions on data centers, networks, and IPv6, I knew I had found a true evangelist in the Internet industry. Several more conference coffees in different locations around the world, and I became one of his IPv6 disciples.

As a senior member of the Hurricane Electric team, Martin enthusiastically spreads the IPv6 word to locations around the world including Slovenia, Hong Kong, Amsterdam, Taipei, Brussels, and the European Commission - in addition to acting as a consultant to IPv6 developers and global digital government policy groups.

An accomplished speaker and writer, Martin brings a unique talent effectively delivering IPv6 thought leadership and actual IPv6 network deployment experience to the Internet community.

This is part one of a Pacific-Tier Communications Thought Leadership series interview with Martin Levy, Director of IPv6 Strategy at Hurricane Electric. Hurricane Electric is a leading Internet backbone and colocation provider specializing in colocation, dedicated servers, direct Internet connections and web hosting.

The headlines are no surprise to those in the Internet business. "Police in Central China have shut down a hacker training operation that openly recruited thousands of members online..." (AP) We've know China, Russia, and several of the former Soviet block countries are the source of sophisticated hacking, and those activities have at least been tolerated, if not directly supported, but the host governments.

The recent dispute between Google and China's government brings another question into the breach - does a national government have the right to censor or control the flow of information in or out of the country? While China may be in the news, citizen journalists in Tehran have been severely punished for attempting to Tweet, email, blog, or transmit cell phone images outside of the country. Under the umbrella of national security do countries like Iran have the right to control that information, or develop teams of professional hackers to go out and look into the accounts of residents and citizens?

Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA): To amend title 18, United States Code, to make clear a telecommunications carrier's duty to cooperate in the interception of communications for Law Enforcement purposes, and for other purposes.

DCSNet, an abbreviation for Digital Collection System Network, is the FBI's point-and-click surveillance system that can perform instant wiretaps on almost any communications device in the US (Wikipedia)

Energy Secretary Steven Chu has evangelized the simplicity of painting rooftops white to save energy. We believe a simple thing like painting a rooftop with solar reflective materials can reduce carbon dioxide production on a scale of billions of tons.

Think Green Hawaii, a local website highlighting local green initiatives notes that even tourists are starting to look for environmentally friendly hotels for their vacations, using examples such as the Hyatt Regency Waikiki which has implemented energy-efficient LED lights in public areas to reduce the use of energy.

Other local initiatives, such as the mbbEMS (Energy Management System) uses wireless communications connecting things such as lanai (balcony) doors to air conditioning units, shutting down the fans when doors are opened, and sensors to determine if guests are actually in their room (Hmmm...., that might not be so "cool'), shutting off lights and closing drapes to reduce the cooling load within a hotel. Great ideas.

Vietnam is in the process of upgrading the entire country's IT system. With support from organizations such as the World Bank, Vietnam is rebuilding not only physical infrastructure, but also starting from the ground up building new IT systems - including a large scale virtualization strategy.

Hawaii may not be so progressive. The first line of an Associated Press story on Hawaii's lack of a functional IT strategy goes like this:

"In many ways Hawaii's government runs its computers like the Internet age hardly happened." (AP)

The story goes on to expose Hawaii's lack of IT policy, the fact they are using old systems, a mixture of Apple and PCs for individual users, have a 1960s version of disaster recovery (offsite physical diskette storage), and other parallels with industry that add more discouraging evidence to Hawaii's IT shortfalls.

2009 was a horrible year for job seekers, and even those holding on to existing jobs. No bonuses, no promotions, layoffs, and nobody hiring. And SoCal successfully beat most of the United States in unemployment claims, by several percentage points, attaching painful and empirical fact to the grim situation.

But that does appear to be changing. Slowly changing, but it is looking better for job seekers in the region. A recent scrape of job openings for Los Angeles and Orange Counties yielded some pretty strong job titles:

• Director of Engineering - Marina Del Rey
• Chief Integration Engineer - El Segundo
• Director, information technology - San Clemente
• VP Global Services - Los Angeles
• Customer Services Director - El Segundo
• Lead Systems Engineer - Los Angeles
• Senior Industrial Director - Irvine
• Smart GRID Architect - Rosemead
• HL7 Integrator - Los Angeles
• Disaster Recovery Manager - Irvine
• Manager, Operations Systems - Van Nuys, CA
• Systems Architecture Engineer - Huntington Beach, CA

And the list goes on... About 350 good positions listed in my 25 January search.

When you live in California, it is easy to be a bigot when it comes to technology. Even within the United States the Silicon Valley attracts venture capital at a multiple of any other location within the country. It is easy to ignore the efforts of companies in Los Angeles, San Diego, Atlanta, or even Boston when looking at the rate of investment going into the 'valley.

Here in Hanoi, the English newspaper "Viet Nam News" provides not only a mini-International Herald Tribune view of international news, but also a well-written review of primarily economic news within Viet Nam. Looking at the topics in this week's papers you see a high number of articles related to both high tech investments in Viet Nam, as well as reviews on the status of technology infrastructure projects.

• "Intellectual Property will be Protected, says VN President"
• Articles on energy conservation and "green" strategies
• The national telecom company (Viet Nam Post and Telecommunications/VNPT) subscriber growth
• eCommerce and eBusiness strategies and support
• Cooperation with other nations such as Israel, India, Japan, and the US
• Regulating the internet "café" and kiosk industries
• A critical article on the low rate of 31% for companies supporting web presence for their organization or business

It is all very exciting. It is exciting to know ICT infrastructure is getting a very high priority by the government, in addition to education. The marriage of ICT and education will continue to provide the country with an educated workforce, who will no doubt find their way into the international university system, and ultimately find their way home to Viet Nam.

A very cold and icy evening in Denver. One of my new data center customers, WBS Connect, was based in Denver under the technical leadership of Scott Charter. Scott gave me a call, and asked if I had the time to get together and meet, since I was in town for some business meetings and he had some ideas I might be interested in.

Several hours later, with staff at the Rialto Café getting annoyed, and my head hitting the data absorption and comprehension threshold all of us experience when talking with people a whole lot smarter than us, I knew I'd met a true visionary.

Ideas. Ideas about technology, about business, about people, and about the world we live in. Beyond the technology, Scott is a guy who genuinely cares about people - an excellent role model for young entrepreneurs.

Emerging technologies have always forced business decision-makers to decide if they will embrace a new technology as a first-mover, or if they will maintain their existing technologies. Each brings a risk - does the cost of maintaining existing technology result in higher maintenance and operational expenses, or does the cost of embracing and acquiring new technology put an unwarranted capital and process change burden on the organization?

Many years ago (~15) the Northern Telecom (Nortel) DMS 100/250/300/500 line of digital telephone switches represented one of the finest technologies for digital communications. The cost was high, but the technology promised telecom carriers everything they would need to operate their networks well into the next generation, which was not yet associated with a real time horizon. At least in marketing PowerPoint slides. Buy a DMS 500, and you will be running that for a couple decades.

Then seemingly overnight the Internet matured, with communications applications such as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), Skype, Vonage, and other Internet-enabled utilities. Suddenly the DMS, 5ESS, 4ESS, NEAC, DSC - all became obsolete almost overnight, replaced by simple Internet-friendly communication applications or Internet Protocol-based "soft switches" which managed telephony over the Internet protocol with a form factor about the size of a mini-refrigerator, And 100 times the switching capacity.