"Yes?" I said. "Hello. How are ya? This is Joey Bag-O-Donuts, and have I got a deal for you. Sucha product like you never saw. It's got Terabit Ethernet, IP over fiber, SNMP V3; it's commerce-enabled and it'll even call your ma using voice over IP."

"Joey, gimme a break!" I snapped. "What does this thing do anyway, run fast? Listen to me now and understand me later. I don't have time for this. I'm up to my neck here with this network and I don't have time to call my own ma, let alone listen to you. Take your sales pitch elsewhere! I'm a busy man."

My response left Joey, well, rather nonplussed. Yes, I had been harsh, but after all, I didn't go to school in Queens just to listen politely to pitches on every box and scam--uh, I mean product and service--that comes my way. But wait, maybe I'm missing the big picture. Maybe all these salespeople and marketing folks really do know something I don't. Maybe they do have my best interests and my company's technical well-being at heart. Nah.

Beat The Clock Instead of wasting a lot of time and money trying to sell me something, anything, perhaps the industry needs to rethink the value prospect. Why not abandon the attempt to sell me upgrade after upgrade and instead sell me something that I truly need? Time.

If the product designers in Silicon Valley would re-evaluate what the problem is out here in the real world, namely eliminating the busywork, they could name their price. After all, that's what network managers care about: maintaining their service-level agreements with the infrastructure and talent they have in place already.

This is a notion that the vendor community finds difficult to grasp: Those of us on the enterprise side simply don't have the time to get excited about your products. The reasons for this are fundamental.

Unless you're working for a company in a backwater industry, you've already placed about as much money into technology as you're likely to. Mainstream corporations already have extracted the requisite savings by using the technology they have. The organization has settled into a grueling pace of upgrades and technology introductions for no other reason than to maintain the competitive balance. Note I said maintain, not gain or improve.

At this rate, a technology that saves us 10 percent or increases throughput by 5 percent is merely survival. Most electronic-commerce sites will increase sales maybe 10 percent to 15 percent. Sure it's worth the investment, but not nearly enough to make everyone a millionaire. Real winners and losers are made when orders-of-magnitude improvements are made or new markets are established. For example, Wal-Mart took the data that every one of its competitors had access to--the transaction details created by its point-of-sale terminals--and leveraged that information better than its competitors. Simple idea, but I bet it wasn't implemented over lunch.

Time For A Change In order to create a competitive technical application that generates a significant capital gain, you need the one fundamental tool that no one offers: time for creative brainpower and good intentions to create capital; time to collaborate and communicate; time to exchange ideas, argue points, get funding, experiment, pilot. In short, time to do the things it takes to succeed.

But how are we supposed to do that with current levels of responsibility, time constraints and resources? Collectively, our hands are tied. Staffing levels are generally frozen, and even if they weren't, there aren't enough skilled technical professionals to go around.