White Papers

The Thunderbolt Proposal

How IBM Can Capture A New Strategic Control Point
In e-Business Network Computing
July 7, 1998

I wrote this paper in mid-1998 in an attempt to convince IBM top management that there was still an enormous opportunity for IBM to penetrate the then booming ISP market with a unique hardware/software/service proposition. Concurrently, this technology would  provide IBM's best large corporate customers a competitive differentiator in terms of faster response time on their web sites.

This paper was widely distributed and discussed, but IBM management never acted upon it.  Unfortunate for IBM, the new market presented in the paper became dominated by a newcomer, Akamai, despite the fact that IBM had pioneered much of the distributed caching technology for the 1996 Olympics web site.  The Thunderbolt proposal would have layered IP-based satellite broadcasting of content atop IBM's distributed caching architecture, providing IBM with formidable competitive barriers to entry, a unique foothold in the racks of the ISP (and now ASP and MSP) community, and an opportunity to sell box cars full of disk drives!   

IBM did nothing and have most likely permanently forfeited this important market to Sun, Cisco and Akamai.  

JBL                    LeadDog/Thunderbolt.PDF