"The walls between IT groups are crumbling, and network professionals report that responsibility for optimal application performance is shifting to them."

How many Network Professionals can identify with that statement? This is something that has been happening slowly, behind the scenes for a long time. I think people are starting to take notice, and I'm interested to see how roles shift and evolve to adapt to the realization.

If you have a critical application being delivered over the network, then guess what...your network is now critical. Moreover, as this article and many before it go on to discuss, the network that these applications run on becomes more than just a delivery mechanism, it becomes part of the application itself.

I'm quite happy to see this message being spread on a broader basis as this story plays out. This is something that I know that I've been preaching for a while, as has F5. Application fluency isn't going to be just a "nice to have", it's going to be paramount. It will be absolutely necessary for your network devices to understand the applications that they're delivering to the fullest extent possible. By doing so they'll be able to deliver the content faster, safer and easier.

It seems that this sentiment is taking hold, and companies are striving to pull their teams together to build bigger, better, stronger applications that take into account the limits and abilities of the network. Why not offload some of the labor intensive tasks from the program to the network where it makes sense? Credit Card Scrubbing anyone? How about Header Blacklisting? These things are easily done on the network device, provided it has the capability, and saves both development time and system resources by having it in one central location, and doing the job where it makes most sense.

It's all in that article, so take a look and join the movement. ;)