The ICT Optimist

No Unified Experience:

The idea that people would benefit if they could interact with complex multi-modal communications systems as if they were a single unified entity.

The delivery of each element of this rich communications experience comes from very different vendors that are generally hostile or competitive to one another. If your vision of rich communications involves audio, video, immersion, information flow and sensory stimulus, then that vision expects a single way to experience such a rich interaction. Today the technology is structured where each of these elements comes from different vendor ecosystems. Each ecosystem pursues different paths to market and technical delivery. The standards bodies they participate in are generally as fragmented as the vendors are. Each vendor has a real fear of being relegated to just a component so each presents a new and improved user interface for their part of the system.

Unification cannot come from a set of fragmented systems that all want to be the primary interface for the users. Additionally many of these vendors disagree on the value of the unified system. For example, the video providers (Polycom, Tandburg/Cisco, LifeSize) believe that the ideal experience is high definition video and all other options are a sacrifice. Alternatively, Microsoft, IBM, Avaya and others with a more voice and messaging centric view believe that HD video is interesting but not really as important as a unified client. Beyond that each vendor advocating unification is advocating their unified client which inherently does not support or even acknowledge the presence of other tools and definitely not other unified clients. At best the vendors have agreed on basic interworking of communications methods but no real progress has been made in addressing the need to have one experience across vendors in the broader communications environment.

What is needed is a new way to interact and control the various tools and systems that are used in the presence of communications. In fact, there is little need to have one universal phone or video system or even messaging tool. Rather there is a critical need to have one uniform interface to control and orchestrate the combined services that these tools could present to users. To achieve a true unified experience, two new technical elements are needed.

1)      Identity Resolution: A common way to unify identity is critical as part of the vision is interaction based on human identity. The challenge today is that identity is fragmented and even though all of the sub elements exist, a unified view of those parts is lacking. The closest we have today is the corporate directory where names, groups, internal phone numbers and other data is consolidated. Unfortunately that tool is lacking visibility into external identities (your IM address, external email, social networking identities, and personal phone numbers). Even if you added these to the corporate directory you  still lack an awareness of which of the identities would be best used to accomplish a specific task. A better approach to this problem is to accept that identity is fragmented and that identity resolution is the key task. Identity resolution is the idea that when you wish to reach a group or person, you provide that intent by name (e.g. call John Doe) and a system with awareness of the various identity bases and systems interacts with them all to present a complete view of John Doe. Additionally since that system is involved in the ongoing communications activities it can be aware of past acts of communicating and even current state so that it can help select the “best” current way to reach John Doe. Given the distributed nature of the Internet and communications, we should not try to have a single unified directory of identity but rather we should incorporate capabilities that hide this fragmentation from the user experience and assist in the selection of communications activity.

2)      Orchestration of communications tools into tasks and action: The act of communication is rarely as simple as a phone call. In fact in most situations we are forced to send messages, call phones, use conference tools and even share data over an extended period of time to accomplish our end goals. This means that we don’t simply need a better phone interface or messaging tool. What would really help in reaching the vision of better communication would be an ability to tie together different methods and tools of communications under the context of a task or interaction. For example, when we need to “assemble a team”, what communication tool is designed to do that? There are tools that allow us to call each person, tools that allow the team to be on the same call, to message each other, to indicate schedules and even to tell us we are not available but there is no real single interface into the act of “assembling a team”. The reason is that under this act of assembling, multiple tools and systems are used in a complex coordination. In most cases the tools don’t come from the same vendor nor do they use the same technology or system. Once we cross system or vendor boundaries things become fragmented. “Assemble” is not the only example of this. In fact almost everything we do at the human level related to communications and interaction has this problem and most high level actions do not map neatly to a tool or system yet each is entirely intuitive to us at a human level. What is needed is a layer of technology that is independent of the underlying communications tools and can coordinate their activities to make these human interactions possible as technology not just ideas.  Because such technology would cross vendor boundaries and treat the telecoms systems as commodity, the current vendor ecosystems have no incentive to build such services.

What is not needed is a new phone system or video technology or even a new directory. What is needed is technology that can pull together the fragmented and complex communications systems into a unified experience that crosses vendor silos and focuses on intuitive human functions and tasks. While this sounds obvious, this is not simple to deliver from the incumbents as it commoditizes their value and forces cooperation which they have little history of doing.

Industry Structure Economics Inhibit Change: Designed to Fail

To achieve the future, the past must commoditize and new vendors emerge to leverage that commodity.

This statement, that our industry is designed to fail in reaching a visionary future, is pretty controversial. I have spent my entire career inside this industry and I have seen how it is innovative, insightful and exciting but also dysfunctional, hostile to innovation, short sighted and at best reactive and at worse self destructive. The ideal in communications is unification and simplicity and a highly personal control over the systems and behaviors, but the industry that currently delivers technology to attempt to reach that goal is structured optimally to prevent that from happening.

Movements towards ideal communication experiences are generally disruptive. The typical provider of telecommunications systems today in the enterprise has been in business for over 20 years. Some have been in existence for over 100. Over such a long duration, these companies have built up huge installed bases that are composed of systems that cannot possibly deliver a truly revolutionary user experience. The challenge is that the very existence of these vendors is dependent on controlling their legacy base and preventing attrition to alternate vendors or technologies. A few examples of this include:

1)      Voice vendors resisted the adoption and delivery of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) not because it was technically difficult but rather that it would open their installed bases to upgrades and architectural changes that would increase the chance of displacement.

2)      Messaging and IM vendors refused to share identity information that would allow for interworking between IM clients because control of the user identity and credential was the only way to keep that user within their base.

3)      Unified client vendors (Microsoft, IBM, and others) refuse to unify their software approach or even interwork between frameworks ( such as .Net and SOA approaches) because a common software structure would allow customers to move between the systems easily and enable third party developers to easily build for either base.

4)      Every voice vendor, when they finally implemented VoIP, did so using proprietary protocols (Skinny for Cisco, UNIStim for Nortel, CorNET IP for Siemens…) which did not interwork and locked terminals to the core switching systems.

Protecting your base is the most important goal of most telecom and IT vendors today and to do that they refuse to move to a more uniform approach or even to allow alternate technologies visibility if they create risk to their legacy.

The future of a more unified and intuitive experience demands an openness and portability across communications technology. No one system will be dominant and no one technology primary in communicating. The idea is that in each act of communications the best and most appropriate combination of technologies should be used. Since no one vendor delivers that complete set of services, embracing this ideal means that they move from being THE communication vendor to simply being A communication tool. That is not desirable as once you are just a commodity; you cannot command premiums such as $300 per line of voice or $700 for a desktop phone or $3000 a seat for a contact center. The idea that the telecommunication systems would become commodity is completely intuitive to everyone except the providers of that capability. Yet the vision of the future requires the existing tools be commoditized under a broader more intelligent value layer  providing an experience that is independent from the existing tools. Many of the leading communications vendors have acknowledged this and are building that new layer but generally with preference to their systems.

As an industry structured in vendor silos, the lack of vendors providing the horizontal capability is the structural weakness. With this in mind the only way to truly achieve our vision of the future is to create that horizontal layer between the tools of communications and the end users. That will require new entrants and a shifting of value. Both will be disruptive but without this change the best we can hope for is a better version of the experience within a closed vendor silo and that will not come close to the transparency and usefulness envisioned long ago in science fiction.

In parts I and II of this dialog a idealistic but hopefully logical vision emerged. The questions now is “If the world envisioned a better way to communicate decades ago in science fiction, why have we not created that experience?”

The list of reasons is long but boils down to two major challenges:

1)      Industry Structure and Fragmentation: Designed to Fail

2)      Lack of Technical Capability:  Absence of a Unified Experience

Given that the vision is pretty clear to even non technical people who watch TV shows about the future, clearly the evolution and current poor state of communications is not based on a lack of vision or obvious goal. Even the narrowest minded person in this industry can explain what “better communications” might look like.  That leaves only issues related to capability and execution as the reason for our lack of progress. In the next few posts it is worth exploring these obstacles so we consider how we might overcome them…

If we could describe a communications experience without being biased by how we do such activities today, how would we describe it?

We would interact with people by name, role or skill they had rather than technical identities and underlying systems. We would never dial a 10 digit number to reach a person; we would simply invoke communications by name or some other human centric intuitive identity.

We would invoke communications based on the way we wished to interact (audio, visual, text, virtual reality…) not based on the tool and technology that implemented the communications experience. We would cease to care that our audio conversation was done via and enterprise PBX, Skype, Google or a cell phone. There is no value in our knowing the details of the technical implementation of our communications experience but there is high value in our ability to select the way we wish to interact.

We would be able to have multiple communications channels and modes (audio, visual, informational, …) active in the context of a single act of communicating. The ideal experience is one where we connect to other parties and within that connection many tools are brought to bear to enrich the flow of information but they are contextually related to each other and their aggregate is the communications experience not each one as a distinct communications experience. Some call this multi-modal interaction.

We would trust the systems to act on our behalf. The idea of telling a communication system to manage a complex interaction would be normal. Imagine being able to instruct a system to “get the team together when the customer call in”  or “make sure everyone is informed about an ongoing event” or even “organize  team to respond to an issue and bring me in when they are ready to give me an update”. Every one of these scenarios is logical, intuitive but today done by human intervention rather than the systems of communications.

We would have full access to all of our communications capabilities wherever we are. There would be no concept of fixed versus mobile communications. Simply put the experience would be fully with us, regardless of if we were at our desk, in our homes, on a plane, in a car or with a customer.

We would be able to control all communications services and interact with them in a uniform way but not have to carry the infrastructure around with us. What we would have is a “universal remote control” and an interface into the experience.  Imagine the user experience being so simple that you could invoke complex interaction and collaboration simply by saying to your interface “get the team together at 3PM”. No more emails, phone calls, phone tag, dialing in, calling people or in any way interacting at a technical level with the system that enabled communications. This is the equivalent of how great universal remotes work in home entertainment today. You push a button and the TV turns on, the DVD launches, the surround system invokes and all the linkages between them happen so that you can enjoy a home theater experience with a single click. If that is possible in entertainment why can’t we imagine it being the way we interact with communications in the future?

The Future of Communications is:

Using Technology to Interact between people using human identities and structures, over multiple modes and methods of communications that are unified into a single integrated experience that is available to us fully wherever we are at the click of a button or the invocation of a simple directive.  Sounds a lot like the Communicator in Star Trek…now the trick is to make it a reality.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Arthur C. Clarke, “Profiles of The Future”, 1961 (Clarke’s third law)
English physicist & science fiction author (1917 – )

The future of communications is not driven by what is technically possible based on past activity but rather by a radical approach to revolutionizing the user experience for the future.

Communications at its core is about interaction, knowledge transfer, sharing, collaborating, and linking groups, thoughts and skills. If we seek the future of communications, we should start by asking what an alternate and better, but so far unachievable, user experience should be. If your consider the Star Trek series and the technology displayed there, the details of how it worked were not what enthralled us, it was rather the way the technology enhanced the capabilities of the human beings using it. Warp Drive was about being able to take us farther than ever possible. The medical devices and scanners were about people being able to diagnose with certainty an illness or condition. Phasers where about being able to protect oneself in a way that allowed you to select the outcome (kill, stun…). And Communicators were about being able to invoke complex communications between people without technical intrusiveness (notice they never dialed a phone number or looked up a directory entry before they talked).

All of these technologies were intuitive to the audience because they represented a better way to experience the world, accomplish a goal or exist as a human being. Yet every one of them was equivalent to magic as the technical capability to do them still to this day eludes us.

When you see that vision of a better way to exist, depending on your view, you either dismiss it as a fantasy or decide that if you can dream it and it makes sense, you would try to make it happen. When I think about the future of communications, or any space for that matter, I always try to consider what about the user experience is missing and how we might improve or transform the task the technology is focused on rather than just try to find a role for a new technology without context. In essence, to answer the question “What is the Future of Communications?” we must start with a view of what the communications experience should look like regardless of our bias and insight of existing technical capabilities.

“What is the Future of Communications?” … continued in part II

Couldn’t help laughing at this story having spent a lot of time in South Africa in the 1990’s. Seems that they had a race to see if DSL or carrier pigeon could transfer 4GB of data faster over 100km. Guess what…the pigeons won.

Great summary on this link by Stan Schroeder

Whats interesting is that broadband speed is a function of the total network design and its usage so trying to define how fast the Internet can be pretty difficult given the uncontrolled nature of complex networks. On the other hand the physics of carrier pigeon speed, distance and the reality of memory card capacity make for a much more deterministic transport method <grin>…. Maybe we can have a race between an iPhone and a cheetah next

I want to Congratulate Vish Nandlall on his appointment as CTO of Extreme Networks. Vish is one of the brightest people I have had the pleasure of working with and he will be a great addition to the Extreme team. Vish has a fantastic background in most technical areas  ranging from next generation wireless to optical to IP transport and has always impressed me with his ability to think outside of the current industry mindset. To read more of his thoughts check out Vish’s blog, the Invisible Internet.  Having made the move to California in a past life myself, I am sure he will thrive in the culture of silicon valley and the winters in California are much more appealing than the -40 degree, 10 feet of slow, second coldest capital in the world winters in Ottawa

Congratulations !

Just flying back form San Francisco on Virgin America and got a chance to try out their on-flight Internet access via GoGo . My first reaction is that its pretty good from a stability and experience perspective. I didn’t try to run any voice or real time services but for email and web browser activity it was as good or better than I get on my cellular broadband connection. As a geek, I ran a few tests and while its pretty high round-trip latency it does not impact web and email services.

Pinging Yahoo.com from the plane:

Pinging yahoo.com [209.131.36.159] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 209.131.36.159: bytes=32 time=254ms TTL=50
Reply from 209.131.36.159: bytes=32 time=772ms TTL=50
Reply from 209.131.36.159: bytes=32 time=551ms TTL=50
Reply from 209.131.36.159: bytes=32 time=628ms TTL=50

Ping statistics for 209.131.36.159:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 254ms, Maximum = 772ms, Average = 551ms

Also went to DSL Reports.com and ran a speed test and had throughput of around 300kb/s upstream and 500kb/s downstream. Not bad at all given the network topology and the fact that I am on a plane traveling a little over 500 MPH. What I could not tell is how many other people on the plane where also using the system so local and down link congestion may get worse as this system is more heavily used.

From a cost perspective it is pretty reasonable and are tiered from $5.95 for a short flight to $12.95 for long haul flights. Given how boring it is to be on a plane these days the cost of being connected is pretty reasonable.

Given how long the industry has been trying to make this work and the huge failure of Connexion, its is nice to see a working technology and business model (so far) . Given that this system is using existing mobile technology the interesting future will be if and how this service improves when new mobile broadband systems based on LTE and WiMAX become applicable to this use case. Regardless, we continue to be more connected every day.

“I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated”  – Poul Anderson

I thought that this quote was extremely insightful given the changes in the industry and the constant attempts by many to describe the changes as orderly and without unintended consequences. I have spent a great deal of time recently looking at structural and technology change in telecoms and IT and the one conclusion I can make is that in all of these activities, the corner cases and hidden complexities are greater than expected.

For as long as I have been in the ICT industry, there always seems to be a technology buzzword that dominates the dialog but no one really agrees on the actual definition of the term, the details behind it or the way to measure the market.

In some cases these issues become resolved and the technology becomes mainstream and understandable. An example of this is the term “switch” when used to describe a network device that passes packets over multiple ports. If you remember when the term showed up over a decade ago, some companies praised the value of switching as a cut-through device versus a store and forward device (meaning the packets spent less time inside the devices buffers and ultimately had lower latency). The issue was that then every multi-port bridge as defined by IEEE 802.1 standards was renamed a “switch”. Soon anything with more than one port on it was a “switch” including things formerly known as routers, bridges, gateways,…  Over time the technical purists gave up and the industry just started calling multi-port bridges, routers and other devices layer 2, 3,or 4-7 switches. All that posturing and debate resulted in nothing more than a new name that honestly didn’t matter at all.

In other situations it just fades away as the next big buzzword appears and distracts the industry from the prior dialog. A good but forgotten example of this was the short lived infatuation of Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) technology and other deterministic LAN technologies. The hype was around the idea that if we could make networks predictable, voice, video, and data could all work in a converged way over the same network. Obviously if you look at the fact that today, these types of traffic do work over the same network but not because we achieved deterministic networking but rather because we threw huge amounts of bandwidth at low cost at the problem and then layered on top a “good enough” class of service model. The hype of perfectly engineered networking was lost by the availability of cheap, pervasive capacity with some band aid type control mechanisms.

So here we are with another new buzzword generating a huge amount of hype… cloud computing. Also with cloud computing is a host of new acronyms describing “everything as a service”, XaaS, IaaS, DaaS, SaaS, PaaS…. These are buzzwords because we don’t have a clear definition of them. On sites like Wikipedia, there is a pretty detailed summary of all the possible elements and models that could be considered cloud computing, for example,  but all one has to do is read the literature from a few players in this area to see that the language and architecture of this space is far from uniform. For a pretty good dialog on this set of new “thing” and how vague they are, the register.co.uk hosted a pretty long webcast. Its done pretty well but the ambiguity this space has is obvious from the dialog. The question though is if cloud computing is in fact a sustainable and real paradigm shift or just simply a better marketing term for a set of different approaches to IT and compute architectures.

In terms of new and unique properties, I find that the basic elements are not new. Most definitions of cloud computing boil down to using :

1. A distributed computing environment – meaning many CPUs are used as a system with a network as the interconnect. The issue is that sometimes this is a classic grid computing model and in other cases it is a much more ad hock collection of interconnected computing resources.
2. A level of virtualization – meaning that the processes have little knowledge of the actual compute hardware they run on. Technology such as VMWare is often used for this but by no means is there a uniform architecture for virtualization yet and the degree of virtualization varies widely from one definition and system to the next
3. A set of services that can be accessed by software running in the cloud – meaning that many of the functions that one would normally have to implement in a discrete system are offered as “services” to any code running in the cloud. For example real time communications and conferencing could be offered to apps in a cloud as a function. Other traditional discrete services such as identity management or even complex functions such as location functions and tracking of client devices could make up some of that broad services suite. The issue here is that what services a cloud delivers is left to the particular specific cloud so an application implemented in cloud A might not have access to the same “services” on cloud B.
4. A web services or other IT friendly programming interface -  meaning that instead of low level compute centric interfaces, functions in this type of system are presented as programming interfaces that are native to the IT applications using the cloud. For example instead of making multiple low level calls to invoke a conference call, a programmer in this type of environment would simply execute a basic function such as “invokecall(phone number)” and the call would happen. All the complexity buried in the cloud on the system that specialized in real time communication.

The problem is that in all 4 of these elements, they may or may not be implemented in a system called a cloud.They may also be implemented in radically different ways and at different levels of sophistication. And in many cases they may not even be present. Yet in all of these permutations the system is called a “cloud computing” system or solution. Sounds like hype and buzzwords to me.

Does this mean cloud computing is hype and irrelevant? Not at all, the idea of pulling a distributed network based compute infrastructure together with good vitalization, embedded services and an IT friendly interface to applications is in fact pretty new. It is also very useful. I have spoken to dozens of small companies in the last six months that are able to achieve more rapid development of solutions and greater functionality because they can host their solutions fully or partially in one of many cloud computing systems out there. They also are able to focus on their core value as the cloud computing systems provide them a set of embedded services that if they had to create and implement internally would be far to costly and complex. All of that means that this idea of cloud based computing is of value, the issue is if it is a singular thing or simply a progression of a number of IT systems that happen to provide good synergy today. I am not sure that cloud based computing as a “new thing” is sustainable or even relevant but the sub elements and the ability to use them together are a good step in the right direction. What inevitably will happen is that more of the elements of the IT ecosystem will evolve and become available to a larger base of customers and additional improvements on other portions of the total IT framework will emerge to provide incremental value beyond the four elements mentioned in cloud computing today. Will that continue to be known as cloud computing or will it simply become part of the way we do IT in the 21st century. I am betting on the latter and with that betting that the term and hype over cloud computing will simply disappear under the broad evolution of all parts of the ICT ecosystem. In any event it will be interesting to see the evolution and how disruptive it is to our industry.

If you want to read a recent article on the pros and cons of cloud computing, Forbes.com just published a decent article that I think sums up many of the issues often overlooked and the reality of this hype not being something new.