FREMONT, Calif. -- Hurricane Electric, the world's largest IPv6-native Internet backbone and colocation provider, today announced that its IPv6 Evangelist, Owen DeLong, will lead a new professional services division dedicated to assisting enterprises with their transition to IPv6. The new division will consult with organizations of all sizes, ensuring that their networking infrastructure is ready for the transition.

On February 3rd, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) distributed the last 5 blocks of IPv4 addresses to the Regional Internet Registries (RIRs). It is likely that the RIRs will distribute these addresses to ISPs and other organizations by around September of 2011. After this happens, there will be no IPv4 addresses left - the supply will be exhausted.

Enterprises that delay the transition from IPv4 to IPv6 will eventually experience connectivity-related issues and associated financial losses. For example, ecommerce sites that fail to make the transition run the risk of revenue losses if consumers cannot connect to their site.

Despite the effort required to transition to IPv6, IPv6 has tremendous long-term benefits and the ROI is strong now. According to a US Commerce Department study, ongoing benefits to the global economy of $10 billion/year will result from IPv6 adoption.

"Today's global challenge is adding IPv6 capabilities to each and every connected device," said Owen DeLong, Hurricane Electric's IPv6 Evangelist and Director of Hurricane Electric's IPv6 Professional Services Division. "For over ten years, Hurricane Electric has built a reputation as a leader in IPv6, and we intend to use our experience to help organizations employ tactics that reduce transition costs and network interruption."

Hurricane Electric