Nxtcomm

Spaghetti and Hardware Love

Doug Mohney — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 21:16:00 -0400

NXTcomm08, Las Vegas--Day one of the Unified Communications Conference has come to a close I've got a lot to mull over. Ibrahim Gedeon, CTO of Telus Communications and self-professed cook gave a heck of an opening keynote, reviewing how Telus has handled a transition from TDM to IP and all the bells and whistles that have come along with it.

Gedeon threw out a lot of interesting points during his wide-ranging talk that touched upon everything from food and wine appreciation to plumbing. A few tidbits:

"Why can I not be able to mix and match unified communications? I can't grab a subset of [UC applications] and mix and match them? Which telepresence solutions work with other telepresence solutions? None! It's very difficult to sell this, very difficult to interoperate."
"Techies love hardware. If they don't see hardware, they don't believe it exists. People love equipment... If they don't have hardware involved in the solution, they don't care. ‘Yah, yah, that's good, but where's the box?' If you want a box, I will sell you a box."
"People are not comfortable giving a credit card to a website, but people give everything to the phone company, their credit card, their social security numbers...."

Changing from a TDM to an IP backbone was only one step in a number of steps Telus has had in order to deliver IPTV and other advanced services. "The key is services, what's next. You need to abstract services. We had to change the middleware for IPTV. Twice," a task he compared to changing out the engine of a car--while it is running.

"I like SOA, it's going from spaghetti to a lasagna mode of operation," Gedeon said, with SOA offering a much cleaner services implementation than the "spaghetti" web of Web 2.0 services.

Free services don't rate highly on Ibrahim's charts. "The more you use Facebook, the more you lose. I know it's politically incorrect, but at what point in time are you going to start bringing in zero dollars for web services? Social networking is free for now, but sometime someone is going to pay... There's a mobile operator in the U.K. based on ads, Blyk. It's free minutes, a free mobile phone, push advertising. I think it's brilliant, and I'm pretty sure they're going to go bankrupt in a couple of months, but for now, enjoy."

I think Gedeon's point on UC interoperability is interesting, but it would require a level of cooperation that goes into layer 9 (Politics; layer 8 is money) of the networking stack. And his comments about free services look pretty good when you lay them on top of WiFi.

- Doug

Welcome Aboard and Stay Tuned

Doug Mohney — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 16:14:06 -0400

Thank you and greetings to the many members of the Digium Asterisk community who have decided to give FierceVoIP a try! Your patronage and continued feedback is both appreciated and encouraged.

Open source telephony--including but not limited to Asterisk--continues to grow and take root and I am hoping to do more to cover both on the software and the hardware side. FierceTelecom, one of our sister publications, will be digging into the ATCA universe in more depth as we move forward.

For both new and old readers, the latest news can be found on our website at www.fiercevoip.com. We're moving to almost-daily posting of breaking news and I expect to have a lot of good interviews and reports coming from the events and floor of NXTcomm. Dan O'Shea at FierceTelecom will be covering the keynotes and talking to many of the movers and shakers in the telecommunication industry while I'll be looking at the VoIP/UC/converged side of the house. If you're in Vegas this week, we'd be happy to have you stop by our party networking event at Moon at the Palms on Tuesday from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m.

- Doug

Clearing the UC Fog

Doug Mohney — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 13:38:05 -0400

Over the past few weeks, the fog around unified communications has started to clear. Vendors are making a step-by-step process to move from the abstract "Well, you've got VoIP and the IP PBX, let's throw in presence and email and the kitchen sink" pitch to honing hard-core reasons to invest in UC.

Certainly, UC in the contact center has been around for a while. CosmoCom wants to make just about everyone in the organization a contact center asset and has added mobility features so you can grab someone out of the office through their cell phone. It's a radical way of rethinking the traditional way companies have dealt with answering knowledge questions and I suspect there's going to be some social engineering involved along the way in implementing this model. Sometimes there are very good reasons why you have to go through three layers of staff before you reach the in-house guru, least of which is that the guru may not be the ideal guy you want to talking to an aggravated customer.

Business-optimized communications will be the hook to many companies, but there are two hurdles involved. The first step is going beyond the "Gee whiz" phase and putting together a trial to measure effectiveness and fine-tune the melding of business processes and UC technology. Nobody's got a straightforward ROI calculation to offer up, so a carefully constructed trial seems to be the best way to make believers out of executives. Finding the money is the second step; Nortel has indicated some companies are squeezing the hardware budget a bit to shake loose enough coin to buy software on the theory it's better to UC-enable some groups/products rather than sprinkle VoIP around everywhere without getting full benefits for the dollars spent.

We'll be spending plenty of time discussing these issues at our UC event at NXTcomm. If you have the chance, please join Dan O'Shea, Carl Ford and me on June 18 and 19 in Las Vegas.

- Doug

Countdown to NXTcomm; a look back at Nortel

Doug Mohney — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 21:59:41 -0400

My calendar this week is chock-full of pre-NXTcomm briefings while my schedule next week is going to be much more challenging between meetings, the Fierce UC event and trying to find time to go the Tuesday evening networking event Fierce is holding at the Palms.

I am pleased to announce Carl Ford will be joining us at NXTcomm, so if you see Carl running around, tell him "Thank you." Carl will be moderating panels at the UC event on Wednesday and Thursday and my advanced thanks to him and Gary Kim and Dan O'Shea for their help.

My head is still swimming from Nortel's press event last week. I'm not quite ready to buy into the marketing-type of hyperconnectivity, but I'm more than willing to agree with the concepts of "communication enabled applications" and "business optimized communications." The former is pretty self-evident; adding in voice and video and presence into applications while the latter is much more powerful.

Business-optimized communications is a much more clear-cut term that appeals to the heart of every C-level position. Unified communications is a generic term most companies struggle with because they want to see a clear ROI on a unified communications investment. Nortel is seeing success by bringing businesses into their facilities, getting them to focus on a particular function, and then having customers conduct a 50- or 500-user trial that turns into a 1,000 or 5,000 or larger implementation in short order.

In my way of thinking, Nortel is using UC as the camel's nose in the tent. Once the nose is there, the rest of the camel is soon to follow.--Doug

SPOTLIGHT: An IT pair in Vegas

Doug Mohney — Sat, 31 May 2008 14:49:03 -0400

InfoComm and NXTcomm, paired together in Vegas this year, would seem to be the perfect complements to each other, according to TVtechnology.com. InfoComm covers the latest in A/V technology (getting content into and out of digital formats for human listening and viewing) while NXTcomm covers the network technology needed to move the content around.

InfoComm is being described as a scaled-down and more focused alternative to the Big Tent approach that NAB has fostered, with professionals focusing in on enterprise applications and multimedia integration. On the other hand, InfoComm will not have the heavy-hitter keynoters that turn out to pontificate at NXTcomm.

For more:
- InfoComm, NXTcomm Pair Up in Vegas

Related articles and events:
Fierce's UC Event at NXTcomm

On the Way to June

Doug Mohney — Thu, 29 May 2008 09:58:09 -0400

Monday holidays throw everything off. I like the vacation, don't get me wrong, but now it's a short week and getting busier by the minute.

We have a Mobile UC webinar happening today at 1 PM, we're finalizing the speakers for our UC event at NXTcomm and Carl Ford is visiting us in the office today. (Hmm, now why would Carl Ford travel all the way to Washington D.C.? Carl has an aunt down here. Maybe he's just visiting his aunt. Yes, that's it).

You'll see a bit of Carl's wisdom on the (web) pages of Fierce in the weeks to come. Carl would say he has no wisdom, and we would smile at the joke together because Carl knows more about the people and innards of the Telecom 2.0 world than a couple of moi-s put together. I think I still can beat him when it comes to a throwdown on advanced wireless topics outside of femtocells, but only just. (And Sue Marek and Lynette Luna could thrash me hands down, but we're just talking about me vs. Carl in a telecom mano a mano).

Let me remind everyone that Dan O'Shea and I will be at NXTcomm and it is the best opportunity to talk to either of us when it comes to Telecom, or IPTV (Dan), or VoIP-issues (Doug). If Dan or I can't meet with you, don't take it personally; we're both playing host at the Fierce UC Event at NXTcomm on June 18 and 19, so we're going to have our plates pretty full during the week. You may want to try to get to us early at the Fierce networking event at Moon at the Palm on June 17.

- Doug