For those of us who spend our days focused on the bits and bytes of the enterprise WAN, it’s easy to lose sight of the upper layers of the OSI model. That said, software is not only redefining convergence across the enterprise network, it’s redefining entire industries.

Netscape co-founder and leading venture capitalist Marc Andreessen penned an essay in the Wall Street Journal  late last year entitled “Why Software Is Eating the World.” His theory is that we are in the middle of a dramatic economic shift in which software companies are poised to take over large swathes of the economy. More...