By Patrick Ancipink

After CEO Joel Trammell’s welcome address yesterday morning, Colonel Mike Mullane, a veteran NASA astronaut with several Space Shuttle missions under his belt, reminded us of the importance of “planning the work, and working the plan” and of the dire consequences of not doing that.

Applying that principle to managing the network for application delivery is a bit less dramatic than space travel, but the importance of teamwork, responsibility and not falling prey to the “normalization of deviance” translates easily enough.

The normalization of deviance was particularly interesting for me to ponder. How many times have I been part of something where a compromise was made and we all said “just this once and never again,” but sure enough that exception becomes part of the standard operating procedure?

The teamwork theme carried through this morning when three gentlemen from NBC Universal told a very impressive story about delivering 3.4 petabytes of video over 17 days from the Beijing Olympics back to NBC headquarters at 30 Rock in Manhattan. (There are 1024 terabytes in a petabyte.)   The video had to be available for live and on demand viewing and for producers and editors to create highlight shows.

The planning was massive, coordinating over twenty vendors to work together trying to predict how interested their audience would be in the event overall, not to mention which events and when. While they could hope for a Michael Phelps sweep or American gymnastics success to create demand (and boost ratings), the big unknowns are what make the Olympics so compelling—that is, the “unscripted human emotion” that creates the history and themes that resonate for years after. You just can’t plan for the murder of an American tourist who happened to be the father-in-law of the men’s volleyball coach and then have that team go on to win an improbable gold medal. So much more attention was paid to that team and their games then could have been predicted, and the network had to accommodate delivering the attendant video.

Tomorrow, Cisco and Microsoft execs will take the microphone to discuss, respectively, where next-gen data centers and unified communications will take us.