Spaghetti and Hardware Love

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 [1]