Jerry Kennelly, CEO of IT company Riverbed, says he feels a little ‘blurry’ after a 30-hour flight from San Francisco, where his company is based. But the trip has been well worth it, he says, as he’s able to serve the whole of the African continent from Johannesburg.

The company, which deals in application acceleration and performance, had a turnover of $1-billion last year and employs over 2 000 people. Explaining his company’s technology, Kennelly says that while everyone knows computers are part of the virtual world, it’s important to remember they’re also part of the physical world. This thinking can be applied to network packets, which are electrons that travel through copper, by satellite or fibre. “So every cost in the physical world has two costs, a cost in time and a cost in dollars. My cost in time to fly here from San Francisco was 30 hours of my life, and my cost in dollars was $1 800. So if a packet with a network query came from San Francisco to Johannesburg, its cost in time would be about three-quarters of a second. At the speed of light, it would take that long for one network packet to make it here, and my cost is what I would pay the network operator to buy the bandwidth to send that packet here.”