I remember when Pointcast was the bane of every IT Manager’s existence. Suddenly, everyone was installing a desktop app that downloaded tons of information constantly and clogged the network with traffic of questionable business utility. But today, our networks are clogged with YouTube videos, Webinars, Twitter, Facebook status updates, instant messaging clients, remote sharing applications–you name it. It’s not going to go away and much of it is useful.

Network World describes the changing role of the network engineer to become more of an application delivery design engineer. We can’t think of networks as monolithic structures where the main concern is designing roadways to deliver traffic. We need to think more flexibly because the uses of these networks are becoming more unpredictable and more mission critical.

The latest issue of Technology Review highlights Stanford computer scientist Nick McKeown’s development of a new standard, OpenFlow, that makes “software-defined networking” possible. Small pieces of firmware in network devices give software access to the routing information so traffic can be optimized.

Normally, when a data packet arrives at a switch, firmware checks the packet’s destination and forwards it according to predefined rules over which network operators have no control. All packets going to the same place are routed along the same path and treated the same way.