As Jeff put out the word today about the un-conference we’re co-hosting on Tuesday, March 18th, he triggered something for me. In his post, Jeff gives us one of the reasons why VON has enjoyed a decade of dominance for next generation communications events:

Over the years I have hosted discussions with colleagues to promote an open exchange of ideas, and this dialogue has always been at the heart of VON. VONCamp takes this premise to a new level by assembling a wider range of people, and placing them in an environment where ideas flow in an unfiltered fashion. Everyone contributes, and the whole ends up being much greater than the sum of the parts. I believe the VONCamp at VON.x will break new ground and will help uncover new opportunities for the people who will be joining us.

Do you remember the days when you went to the interop events and the trade show floor because you were afraid not to? I remember cruising by competitor booths, seeing who was talking to who - or seeing my client’s competitors come to my booth because they wanted to see how far along they were in product development. I’m feeling that again, because I’m realizing that the vast majority of people in the communications space haven’t caught on to the movement of voice away from platforms and silos and onto the network and broken apart into re-usable services. I’m not talking about VoIP - I’m talking about the proliferation of telco 2.0 startups, voice APIs and other “over the top” service providers.

I’m attending and participating in the un-conference for one primary reason: I’m afraid of what I’ll miss if I don’t. This market is moving really fast, and the only way to keep on top of it is to have close relationships with the people who are moving it. This event is my chance to meet and shake the hands of the forward thinking people that matter. The un-conference is about openness, conversation… but most of all relationships.

Posted by Thomas Howe @ 3:31 pm | Filed Under Lead Stories | Leave a Comment

I was so upset to see that Andy stole my march madness line… but I figured that unless I said something, maybe people would think he stole it from me. What? Darn - blew that one.

Seriously, we’re gearing up hard over here for our death-March of trade shows and announcements:

• We’re kicking the month off on March 12th at Ecomm 2008 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. Other than the un-conference at the VON show the next week, if you live in the area, and you’re not there… not good. Forward thinking doesn’t get any more forward than this, and the line up of speakers is over-the-top impressive. This is the place to think out of the box. During my talk, I’m going to try to convince a room full of voice geeks to simply give up innovating voice applications, and to start using voice to innovate other applications. In preparation, I’m watching submissions 101 every night. (Really, I am. Suicide Choke is a good reason not to turtle.)
• After that, I’m giving the communications enabled business process workshop at the VON show the very next Monday. If you need a jump start into the new world of voice in the enterprise, mashups and extending process using VoIP - show up. The husband of Mary Melissa Margaret McCarthy is going to be wearing green during that day, and Guinness that night.
• Then, the next morning, I’ll be nursing a hangover.
• After I can see again, we dive into the real meat of the month: the VON Unconference. Hosted by Jeff Pulver and myself, the unconference is a two or three hour get together where the audience sets the agenda for the session, and then self organizes to discuss it. If you haven’t been to an unconference, it’s a great experience, but this one is extra-special. Most of the speakers at VON will be showing up, along with luminaries from the worlds outside of telecom. You see, if the EComm speakers are excellent at forward thinking, then the VON speakers are excellent at monetizing forward thinking. If you want to have two hours with the absolute best business/technology guys in the service provider world, that’s where you’ll be.

I’ll see you there!

Posted by Thomas Howe @ 11:01 am | Filed Under Lead Stories | 2 Comments

With all the web services and SOA terms flying around, it’s hard to keep the functions and layers straight. At the Web Services on Wall Street show last week, Hugh Grant, from Credit Suisse global IT research and development, gave a presentation that I wished my telephony friends could see.

In particular, he gave a quick overview of enterprise SOA architecture that clearly showed how all this stuff goes together. I’ve recreated it here:

• The top layer is the mashup layer, and for you OSI guys - it’s the presentation layer. It aggregates and presents information supplied in the layers below it. This aggregation is normally done through rich internet applications (RIA) such as Microsoft Silverlight or Adobe Flex. Mashup tools such as JackBe and Openscape provide graphical and scripting tools tools to present information as web pages. IBM’s QEDWiki is a collaborative tool that provides document centric views, or you can just be plain old-fashioned and use PHP, Ruby or Java to create a web application.
• The middle layer provides governance, business rules and workflow orchestration for the enterprise. Essentially, this layer makes sure that resources are used by appropriate people in an appropriate manner, and runs business processes for the company such as order management, supply notifications and risk triggers. For financial and health care concerns, this is a big deal, as there are many securities and HIPA regulations that must be followed. IBM, BEA, Sun and Actional from Proress Software all provide governance and workflow solutions.
• The lowest layer consists of the many data and functional services available to the enterprise. For instance, for a wall street firm, one data service may be a constant flow of orders made on the stock exchanges, or it may be an on demand service that calculates the current risk profile of a fund or position. For health care companies, it may be a database of all of the procedures performed on a patient by a department. Sometimes these services are actually delivered over the Internet and are provided by vendors such as Strike Iron or Xignite. Mashery began by turning this around: they allow enterprises to share there internal services to other entities outside the firewall.

So, where does voice fit in here? Primarily at the bottom level. Voice services are published as a service to be used in the layers above it. Access to these services is monitored and guarded by the governance layer; the services are invoked by either business rules, workflow orchestration or by mashups in the top layer. Typical voice services include meet me dialing, click to call, conferencing, outbound messaging and VoiceXML services. Who are the players here? I’ll go over them in depth later, but here’s the important list:

• Platform Offerings : Blue Note Networks, LignUp, Iperia and the 800 lb gorilla, Avaya
• Hosted Offerings : British Telecom, Orange and Vodafone

Posted by Thomas Howe @ 10:17 am | Filed Under Lead Stories | Leave a Comment

According to Drew Clark, director of strategy for IBM Venture Capital Group, a few places. He mentions not only interesting areas like convergence, the mobile market and software as a service, he mentions mashups. As I heard at the recent Web Services on Wall Street show, SOA and Web Services applications are becoming defacto standards for next generation applications, not only for the obvious financial benefits such as lower operations costs, but strategic ones such as higher value organizational process control.

From his post:

Web 2.0 Mashups & Composite Apps. Web mashups are fast becoming the dominant model for the creation not just of so-called “situational apps” but of full-blown composite enterprise applications built on leading-edge SOA (service-oriented architecture) foundations. Small and medium businesses, as well as enterprise customers are now formulating enterprise mashups. Widgets, small reusable programs based on Web 2.0 techniques, are rapidly emerging as the reusable, loosely-coupled components of the programmable Web. 2008 will be the year when we begin to see SOA join forces with increasingly popular Web 2.0 standards and technologies in the enterprise. Combining Web 2.0 for the agility and ease-of-use it brings to applications and services, and SOA for the rigor and governance it instills across the enterprise, is surely the best of all worlds.

Posted by Thomas Howe @ 8:17 am | Filed Under Lead Stories | Leave a Comment

Even though web services and SOA architectures are more scalable, higher performing and support application development better than traditional platform applications, the real story is money. Selling software and hardware as a service massively reduces initial capital and ongoing maintenance costs. Applications based on web services architectures are less expensive to develop, not only because they leverage components from other applications more effectively, but because they take a more common and less expensive type of developer.

As I was running down the cause of Friday’s S3 service interruption, I came across this excellent financial analysis of the cost savings of a web services deployment versus that of a traditional platform approach. Mind you, this analysis is historical - this cost savings was actual, not projected. The author is the Don MacAskill, the CEO and Chief Geek of SmugMug, a photo sharing site. As you can imagine, photosharing is storage intensive, and Don’s company moved off of an Apple XRaid platform onto S3 not only to gain the financial benefits (both in cash flow and P/L) but because it was more reliable than an internal solution. I encourage you to read the post yourself, but here’s the bottom line straight from his post:

• Total amount NOT spent over the last 7 months: $423,686
• Total amount spent on S3: $84,255.25
• Total savings: $339,430.75
• That works out to $48,490 / month, which is $581,881 per year. Remember, though, our rate of growth is high, so over the remaining 5 months, the monthly savings will be even greater.
• These are real, hard numbers after using S3 for 7 months, not our projections. They closely match (but are actually slightly better) than our projections.

It’s a small jump to see how other “commodity” based services have the same financial benefit - from processing, to billing and even to telephony services. It’s a challenging time to be a telephony vendor… and it just got a little worse.

Posted by Thomas Howe @ 9:02 am | Filed Under Lead Stories | Leave a Comment

Even though web services and SOA architectures are more scalable, higher performing and support application development better than traditional platform applications, the real story is money. Selling software and hardware as a service massively reduces initial capital and ongoing maintenance costs. Applications based on web services architectures are less expensive to develop, not only because they leverage components from other applications more effectively, but because they take a more common and less expensive type of developer.

As I was running down the cause of Friday’s S3 service interruption, I came across this excellent financial analysis of the cost savings of a web services deployment versus that of a traditional platform approach. Mind you, this analysis is historical - this cost savings was actual, not projected. The author is the Don MacAskill, the CEO and Chief Geek of SmugMug, a photo sharing site. As you can imagine, photosharing is storage intensive, and Don’s company moved off of an Apple XRaid platform onto S3 not only to gain the financial benefits (both in cash flow and P/L) but because it was more reliable than an internal solution. I encourage you to read the post yourself, but here’s the bottom line straight from his post:

• Total amount NOT spent over the last 7 months: $423,686
• Total amount spent on S3: $84,255.25
• Total savings: $339,430.75
• That works out to $48,490 / month, which is $581,881 per year. Remember, though, our rate of growth is high, so over the remaining 5 months, the monthly savings will be even greater.
• These are real, hard numbers after using S3 for 7 months, not our projections. They closely match (but are actually slightly better) than our projections.

It’s a small jump to see how other “commodity” based services have the same financial benefit - from processing, to billing and even to telephony services. It’s a challenging time to be a telephony vendor… and it just got a little worse.

Posted by Thomas Howe @ 9:02 am | Filed Under Lead Stories | Leave a Comment

I recently wrote an article for VON Focus that’s certainly going to get me shot.

I’m beginning to feel that the second sacred cow of telephony is unified communications (the first being IMS). Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, unified communications is the latest in the series of attempts by telecommunication vendors to add value into their customers networks, but I’m not buying it. The central premise of unified communications is general efficiency - it allows users to find each other faster, and have lesser amounts of friction as they try to manage their communications experience. And, as I said in the article, efficiency is a good thing, right? I like it - you like it - bully for us.

Here’s my basic problem - arguing a business case based on general efficiency is too much of a “trust me” argument for this old man. With a few notable exceptions, general efficiency gains are difficult to prove or to capture. Specific efficiency gains are easy to see and monetize. Let’s give a direct example : find-me-follow-me makes calling more efficient, and there’s no doubt. I will get the call quicker because it’s more likely to find me. But what’s the impact to my company’s bottom line as a result? Hard to tell - harder to prove. Now, let’s contrast that with the older VoIP gateways. Using voice compression, you could fit multiple voice channels - up to 6 - on the same DS0. When voice was expensive, this was valuable stuff, as you could radically reduce your phones bills, especially for international routes. What’s the impact on the bottom line? Your long distance charges cost 84% less. That’s an efficiency you can point to, quantify, sell and monetize.

I think this is a “tell” - this is how you know that your poker-playing vendor might be bluffing you. You can’t argue that unified communications has no value… but it’s really hard to quantify, hard for them to sell and difficult for investors to monetize. This is the best they’ve got? If so, I say this is not good.

Start shooting now - I know it’s coming.

Posted by Thomas Howe @ 2:19 pm | Filed Under Lead Stories | 1 Comment

Here’s some quotes from some of the speakers… thought you’d like to hear them.

• Companies were tought in 1930 that firms should be vertically integrated because integration costs were so high. With the light weight programming models provided by SOA and mashups, that’s clearly different.

• Marc Adler : Citigroup : In order for citigroup’s efforts to be successful, all silos have to be broken. Current expert analysis is so siloed that only the ten people who have it can use it. SOA allows others in the group to subscribe to the data to use. Updates to volatilty curves for example. It allows any application to subscribe to the analysis of any other application, and in a controllable and predictable way. The challenge of SOA is to subscribe to anyone publishing data. As an example, risk data can be published for real time analysis and decisions based on the current risk profile.

• Jonathan Rochelle : Google : Is Google Docs only for small companies? Google isn’t going to be doing a lot of mashups, but will be a platform for millions of mashups. Google started concentrating on consumers as people - moved to people as workers. Small to medium businesses have it easy, but demanded Google to create apps. Making the productivity argument, which is one of the line items that people are starting to add, which haven’t been there. People used to bring work experience home… now the tide is changed, where people bring the productivity back to work.

• Michael Ogrinz : Bank of America - Do you believe that corporate portals are still relevant? No, I don’t think so. The model is close to the TV model, where it was network control. The core of the problem is that the power users pick what content is important to them. The notion that the corporation figures out what is appropriate for dissemeniaton, that stays. Finally, we have content creation users that have this build in modicum of development experience, now can have other avenues to publish that data on pages, widgets and other things like excel spreadsheets, phones, etc. Talk about the long tail, and the IT department not serving users - they will serve the platform that the users need to make their own mashups.

• Ogrintz : If you want to do a mashup about leading indicators, booking a flight on the top eight flights looking for trends in seats availability. (Research example.) Anyone can do this, so these are examples of where anyone can get this - so data is not private. This is more about your ability to analyze, not the availability of data.

• Adler : All of the banks have been hit by fines from exhanges because we let data seep out. Reuters will charge a user if they can see it, even if they don’t use it. The interesting things is “how do we entitle the data”. We can use those market quotes in dervied data, avoiding the costs of displaying real time data, but still make it valuable. No solution for this yet, but something we need to work out.

• Rochelle : Need to simplify the SLA platform will be an acceptable method of handling trust issues. Use Web 2.0 for services based architecture to simplify that process, you’ll get much higher rates of acceptance.

• Moderator : GS said SAS will become pervasive in the coming years? True? All : Duh

• Ogrintz : SOA is so super well supported, it’s why you don’t hear from it. The reason for the rise of the Web is because the IT department sucks. The IT departments can handle a browser, and that’s all.

• Rochelle : FoxPro,Dbase was over because they could get it done better than the IT department could. They basically suck. That allowed people like Google to get around the IT department and go straight to the users.

Posted by Thomas Howe @ 11:51 am | Filed Under Lead Stories | Leave a Comment

Like a new car that turns used as it rolls off the lot, all real world networks have legacy issues. Only the smallest and most trivial of enterprise and carrier networks are homogenous; the vast majority are combinations of past purchasing decisions, both successful and failed strategies and a mix between old, but proven, technologies and new, but unproven, promises. As technologists, we can fool ourselves quickly by starting with a clean sheet of paper. It is a pleasure that our customers rarely have.

Mashups - light weight applications written on top of web services or SOA architectures - accept this basic fact, and allow us to develop new applications from old components. Mashups take data and services from several sources and combine them in ways to present analysis or functionality in an interesting way. The sources of data and services may be from older equipment, or from newer purpose built machines. By using web services and SOA as the main integration mechanisms, the mashup can not only be created with high productivity web scripting methods, but the devices that create the services can be used for other applications in the future. Even when the legacy equipment does not have a web services interface, off-shoring a software development effort to write a custom library is straightforward and relatively inexpensive. For companies at the end of their product life cycles, put that feature on your checklist… many vendors now have a decent story for that. If your preferred vendor doesn’t… find one that does.

In my particular field of communications enabled business process (CEBP) development, I see these issues everyday. I would like to caution the larger enterprises out there to be careful with your vendor negotiations. Avaya may want you to upgrade all of their equipment to support your CEBP deployment, but be careful. You may be able to take your existing equipment and extend the functionality using custom software, or there may be other vendors such as LignUp, iPeria and BlueNote Networks instead of fork-lifitng your existing implementation. At a minimum, take the time to do the numbers before you sign the contract. Remember that the hidden value of web services and SOA based applications is that, since they are relatively easy to develop, they are also relatively easy to port and re-write. Before you go out and spend ten million dollars on infrastructure, pick yourself up a LignUp switch, try your application and measure your return. If you have success, then you’ll know how to move forward, either with your existing big iron vendor, from an upstart or not at all.

Posted by Thomas Howe @ 9:21 am | Filed Under Lead Stories | Leave a Comment

Last month, an article I wrote for IPConvergence.tv birthed quite a spirited conversation on the blog, and I think there’s another way of making the same argument that I wanted to put forward.

The main point of the article was that IMS was a heavy weight architecture, aimed at large carriers interested in large scale deployments with high levels of control. In my experience, innovation comes from light weight architectures, aimed at smaller service providers interested in niche deployments with high levels of customization for those downstream from them. Essentially, if the main point driving IMS was in support of innovative services, I believe it that is has failed in achieving it, as it makes all the wrong design decisions.

Here’s another way of making the argument. In everyday life, there’s a correlation between feature set and mass adoption, and that is the simpler the feature set, the larger the audience it can serve. Pure commodities like corn, water and sugar are universally purchased and consumed, and are in fact prized for their homogeneity. As a farmer, you don’t want your corn to smell or taste any different than somebody else’s. Economies of scale work well for these products, and in the book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, you learn that 25% of all products in the grocery store are derived from corn. As you go up the feature complexity line, and let’s keep it with food, you see that bread is again fairly generic, but now there’s a number of different sorts of bread to satisfy customer needs. Sandwich bread is different than dinner rolls, croissants are quite different than blueberry muffins. Not only do the features become more important and numerous, but the apparent audience is less for each one. Finally, any bake shop or patisserie shows you the wonderful complexity of presentation, color, taste, smell, purpose and audience. The very same raw ingredients are used to make clothes, bags, perfumes, additives, food coloring, artificial flavors… the list goes on forever. Here we see niches in full bloom, where the end results of complex features are not only (much) higher margins, but smaller audiences and more emphasis placed on customization and hand crafting.

Does IMS really support the carriers in providing this raw material to be used by others in innovative ways? It could, and I hope it will be. Carriers like BT and Vodafone get it. Unfortunately, the remainder of the large carrier world is dominated by those that that believe that it’s the carriers job to provide the ten thousand products, and not the homogenous corn. You can understand why they want this to be true, as the margins on wedding cakes are insane. The basic trouble, though, is simple: nobody would eat wedding cake every day - and that’s not a big enough business for the carriers, even if they could make a decent one. IMS deployed by carriers to support other’s applications makes a lot of sense, but requires the carriers to come to terms with their position in the food chain. Many people disagree with my view, including many whom I respect and whose technical skills I trust and admire. Honestly, though, it’s hard for me to taste it differently.

Posted by Thomas Howe @ 11:07 am | Filed Under Lead Stories | 1 Comment