Thomas Howe

Well, like the change of seasons, the VON show is now upon us, and I spent most of the day at the Open Source summit fishing for new ideas. Basically, I think I confirmed in my mind that the vast majority of success in open source has been in the Enterprise and new carrier market. I asked the panel if they thought that large carriers and open source was necessarily a bad combination. They remarked that they thought large carriers would, and in fact were, deploying open source based systems now. I wonder if they are deploying these solutions at the edge of their networks, or in some sort of trial. I can’t imagine that they are replacing core equipment with it. I noticed that even the smaller service providers (that being Telio) had deployed open source solutions that were glued together with their own custom code. In other words, even the smaller carriers weren’t taking single open source efforts off the shelf. They did say, and I believe it, that the SER proxy was the best of the available carrier class open source offerings. I do think that it’s curious that every time they are asked about carrier class, they speak about scalability, without addressing other carrier concerns like fault tolerant hardware platforms, FCAPs or regulatory concerns such as CALEA. I’m not used to being a naysayer, but I wouldn’t be worried about open source taking over Nortel’s business, at least this year.