The Future of Communications – Part IV – An Industry Designed to Fail
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.
December 16th, 2009 at 8:37 pm
I concur, although I only have 6 years experience in voice services specifically SIP based voip, I have run into some interesting hurdles while working on “next gen” voice services testing at a large Canadian telco.
Today we were testing some call flows originating from a IP PBX, through a session border controller onto a softswitch, connected to the PSTN and SS7 network. My co-worker and I work on the IP side and our testing partners work in the pstn and SS7 realm.
There was a particular test case where the SS7 tester was walking us through a large bunch of SS7 parameters (way beyond me). My co-worker remarked that it was so complicated that it would be nice to migrate fully to SIP.
The SS7 tester rebuked him, saying that SIP was incapable of addressing all the intricacies of our network and only when it starts incorporating the SS7 parameters could we ever consider using it in a production environment.
As I sat there taking log traces on the SBC listening to this, I wondered about the VoIP network I helped build back in 2004 that operated for 2 years before our newly hired executives killed the service for it not being built on carrier-class equipment. Oh yes, these executives were ex- Telco types (from the another large Canadian telco) they were hired to portray a veneer of telco goodness for potential buyers.
Oh well, I’m sure some day we will get a next gen voice network here in Canada.
December 17th, 2009 at 10:15 am
Mick,
Great example of the industry behavior. There is nothing wrong with “Carrier Class” systems and protocols or their expectations but it always seemed strange to me that many believe that to have this type of high availability and scale, you must build and implement technology exactly as it had been implemented in the past where that was the outcome. To hold this believe is to think that no future technology can be as or more resilient or scalable as the past…a pretty silly belief as it is betting against innovation and the future.
I remember having a dialog with some folks who built 6 9’s hardware and we got on the subject of resiliency architectures. My observations is that even at 6 9’s, the MTBF is still not infinity so every system they build will eventually fail. If we acknowledge that then the innovation shifts from simply making the elements resilient to focusing on system resiliency and behavior when the failures occur. When you think of the system then suddenly you can trade off a lot of hardware and node complexity for more effective inter-node protocols and distribution of behavior that survives in the presence of a failed element. I think we are seeing some of this in the current hype on cloud computing where people were attracted by the economics and flexibility but now are beginning to focus on innovation to make the “cloud” resilient even though the nodes are not.
There is nothing wrong with the past and its technology but an open mind goes a long way in creating a better future technology set.
John
December 17th, 2009 at 6:31 pm
Thanks for your reply,
So the objective seems to be to make the “system” resilient even though the individual components might not be. I suppose this is how successful human civilization works, individuals might die off but as long the culture is resilient it survives and even prospers.
Regards,
Mick