This week, 17 individuals from about a dozen organizations in the DNS space met up in Manchester, NH at the Dyn Inc. headquarters for a first of its kind Summit for DNS industry insiders. Called “Inside Baseball,” we wanted to bring people together from every spectrum of the DNS industry to inspire collaboration and innovation.

Some industries are dominated by cut-throat competition and negative tactics. The Internet has an element of competition but a spirit of cooperation permeates its operators to ensure technical interoperability. In short, it’s not a zero-sum game. IETF and network operator organizations (NANOGs) continue to infuse an academic nature to the space and our hope is to take it to a new level.

Our goal was to bring together people from different organizations, who had never met, who are doing authoritative DNS, recursive DNS, and measurement work. We intentionally reached out to a wide range of organizations that varied in size and age to provide many different perspectives. Some were familiar faces and some were new.

Topics ranged from anycast, IPv6 deployment and demand, DDoS and threats, market size and trends, evolution of customers, and recursive DNS. The general sense of the room was that an increased focus is being placed infrastructure with DNS being singled out more and more. I think everyone was excited about the increased awareness of DNS and its contribution to keeping the Internet going.

The format for the first Summit was left intentionally loose to encourage discussion. It was really the first time where a commercially-oriented set of organizations could talk about DNS. This is not to discount IETF or ICANN or other events—this is not a replacement. It is a different focus to foster communication and create opportunities to work together.

The highlight of the event (at least for me) was an Ask Mr. DNS podcast hosted by Cricket Liu of Infoblox and Matt Larson of Verisign. We were all invited to help answer questions and discuss different DNS topics: http://www.ask-mrdns.com/2010/05/episode-16/

The day ended with a trip to Manchester, New Hampshire’s minor baseball game (go Fisher Cats!) and you can see the first pitch here: http://www.youtube.com/dyninc#p/a/u/0/xwyYmLXkBik. Cricket claims it a strike but we all know it was off the plate.

We sincerely want to thank everyone who participated and we look forward to the second annual Inside Baseball event, perhaps on the West Coast or somewhere else! Based on feedback, we expect the second event to be even larger.