Oooma Tech Update

Alec Saunders did a fantastic job digging into some of the tech issues in this entry his blog.
Alec, I thought YOU were the marketing guy and I was the engineer. Good job, old man.

Is Facebook the Promised Land?

There's no denying an exodus is underway. So far, I've seen Pat, Moshe, Alec and a host of other go over to Facebook from LinkeIn, all in the space of a week. Is it just me, or do you find this remarkable? I mean, not only for the abruptness of it, or the lemming like nature by which it's happening, but for what it says about Web 2.0 principles?

I went back and checked the original piece by Tim O'Reilly, and I found what I remembered reading :

The race is on to own certain classes of core data: location, identity, calendaring of public events, product identifiers and namespaces. In many cases, where there is significant cost to create the data, there may be an opportunity for an Intel Inside style play, with a single source for the data. In others, the winner will be the company that first reaches critical mass via user aggregation, and turns that aggregated data into a system service.

And when I read it, I remembered thinking : "Oh yes, that's part of the reason social networking is such an excellent idea. Since there's a bunch of information that exists between contacts, not simply IN the contact, there's real value in owning the data. " For instance, the service can tell you when a classmate joins the service, so that you can be connected.

Now, here's what I'm looking at. LinkedIn has something like 11 million users, and nearly all the fortune 500 is represented in that group by at least one leader. It's a big group, and it's a well known group, especially to business users. If there's a mass exodus to Facebook, doesn't it sort of suggest that the creation of these large databases of information isn't THAT hard to replicate? That the Web 2.0 promise of monetizing hard to replicate data using other people isn't as valuable as we thought? Now, if LinkedIn keeps going, and keeps going up in membership, we'll know just how valuable that data is. If not....

Alec Saunders from Enterprise 2.0

Alec just got back from the Enterprise 2.0 show, and has an excellent post about social networks in the Enterprise space. What I found fascinating is how employees are bringing their services, in particular their communcations services, with them in the business. I think it has some pretty major implications for Enterprise IT managers, if not the larger organization. You should read it, if you have a minute. Oh, and know you know what I was doing while I was watching Will play little league.

Aikido, Retreat or War

I understand that most everyone else in the country is celebrating Maunday Thursday or Passover... I'm celebrating Alec Saunders Day. I suppose the vacation did him some good, as his blog is roaring away these days.

You should check out his analysis of the newly announced Office Communications Server, where he concludes that we now have a world where communications and productivity applications are inextricably entwined. I could not agree more, which really hurts, because I although I deeply respect and fear the Microsoft machine... take your hands off of my Mac or die. Microsoft really has it right this time, and shows that they really do have a trick or two left up their sleeve. In fact, I will amplify Alec's point : we now have a world where the business process and communications are inextricably entwined. At this point, only Microsoft and the Internet world have credible platforms for transforming the business process through communications technologies.

At the end of the piece, Alec talks about three strategies for coping in a Microsoft world. You can practice Aikido, and use Microsoft's momentum to your advantage, you can go to war and hit them head on, or you can retreat and go vertical. Iotum likes Aikido, which I believe is the only decent strategy for any horizontal-looking service. If you have a horizontal offering, you better start studying O-Sensei yourself, because it's the only way to survive. For the others, I would retreat and go vertical, very vertical, and very quick. Microsoft consistently fails in verticals, for an obvious reason : they ARE omnivorous, and verticals are all about focus. You'll be safe there.

For the bigger boys, let me suggest that you go to war with Microsoft. Why? It will amuse me, and all the other bloggers. You will not be so amused, but just like large carriers who are busy hastening their demise with IMS, you don't have very many other options.

Alec Saunders : VoIP Not a Category Anymore

An excellent post from uber-blogger Alec Saunders today, talking about "VoIP not being a business category anymore." From his post:

Perhaps the real issue is simply this. VoIP isn't the reinvention of the telephone which we all foresaw five years ago. At least, not the VoIP peddled by the likes of Vonage. It's ordinary telephone service… delivered on IP. While popular, it has failed to deliver the revolution industry types envisioned. "Innovations" like web-based dashboards are long in the tooth, and the truly revolutionary applications which could have been delivered have never seen the light of day.

I agree with Alec, and I think I know the reason for the lack of innovation: education and habituation. Even if you have the world's best telephone service, if people don't know about it, they won't use it. And even if they DO know the service exists, habits are hard to change. That's why Iotum is my bell-weather... the canary in the coal mine, as it were. To me, the Iotum applications are super valuable. If these guys don't make it, it's hard to see how anyone in the carrier services market will.

Next Generation Communications Primer

Now that I've stuck my foot firmly in my mouth, it's time to come clean on what I think the future of our industry is. I'll put together a comprehensive article about it soon, but as a preface to it, here's my "Next Generation Communications Primer". Each item in the list is critical to understand, because I believe it will have a deep impact on every aspect of our technology and our business. You may not agree with some of the items on the list, but I encourage you to at least become passingly familiar with them, so that your head will be clear when the arguments are made. This list is not exhaustive, and I cannot say which are the most important things on it, but I can say that each is critical to understand.

1. Web 2.0 : This takes the cake for the most overused marketing term of the decade, I know, but the concepts behind Web 2.0 are absolutely critical and real. Tim O'Reilly wrote "What is Web 2.0" more than a year ago, describing what it really means. Read this article, and commit it to memory. When Om recently said that there was nothing Web 2.0 about Grand Central, this paper describes what Om meant. Even though the paper itself doesn't address voice specifically, it does provide a basic understanding of the current state-of-the-art of web technologies. Web 2.0 does not mean "whatever we do next on the web"... it has a specific meaning for the design and deployment of web applications.
   
2. Amazon Turks : I've been blogging on this for a while. The concept behind turks is that it is artificial artificial intelligence; it's a way for a computer program to call a function that is performed by a real, live human being. Even more so, it does so in a way that can use a thousand people for a single hour, and then never again. Amazon Turks makes human labor available at Internet scale. The implication for telephony? Here's a quick one: how about professional receptionists that you rent out for a minute at a time? Another one - do you want to test out your new service with ten thousand people calling at once? Another one - how about near real time transcription of conferences and messages? Another one... do you get my point? The applications are endless.
   
3. The rest of the Amazon Web services : It is important that you understand the implications of storage and computing power on demand. So much of our industry depends on capacity... both over and under. With the Amazon Web Services, you only need what you need. You can nearly instantly ramp it up, and down. You may argue that Amazon will not be the final vendor for this sort of technology... whatever. Somebody will.
4. New Presence : Alec Saunders and his crew at Iotum developed an application that finally gives presence back to the user, and away from the service provider. Presence is so earth shattering because it's the first time human beings can express, in real time, their preferences for how, when and from whom they would like be contacted.
   
5. Long Tail : The long tail refers to the phenomenon for large distributions, where there are a small number of very heavily weighted items in the distribution, and the rest of the items in the collection have, by comparison, a small weighting. As an example in music, something like 80% of the sales used to be in the Top 40. Since the Internet radically lowers the barriers to entry and costs of sales, it becomes possible to be profitable with a much smaller audience. In addition, since it's possible to offer a wider selection of products and services, increasingly larger amounts of sales go to the tail than the head. The implication for telephony is clear - services like voicemail which are big sellers remain that way, but the bulk of revenue is in the smaller services, now possible because of VoIP.
6. Ruby On Rails and The Geeks : The technical and cultural shift of web development outside of our industry is massive. I could go on about how blindingly fast web development has become, but it's only half of that story. Today's geeks live with a different ethos about asking permission, content ownership and architecture, which results in massively scalable applications which are simple to write and deploy. Because of web services and VXML, telephony development is now web development. You don't need a million dollars or months of development to deploy innovative services. No one does.
7. The carrier-class argument no longer holds. It used to be that innovative applications for telephony were difficult to scale because you could only stack so many Dialogic cards in a server, and so many servers in a rack, before it became silly. Packet based architectures are intrinsically more stable and robust than TDM architectures, scale better, are easier to deploy and are less expensive to develop and maintain. In fact, architectures such as TDM and (in some ways) IMS actually contribute to lower reliability and innovation. Pure SIP, and it's son P2P SIP, are systematically better.
8. Programmable Web : Please visit programmable web. The web is now the platform, not a 2 million dollar piece of iron. When's the last time you heard of an interesting application being delivered on any other platform? If you think that mashups are the province of geeks, I would remind you that every successful travel site is now a mashup. If you think there are no good web APIs for telephony, I would have you visit PhoneGnome, TellMe, Voxeo, FlatPlanetPhoneCompany, JaJah, Jaduka...

New Version of Iotum Talk Now

I think the real definition of a killer application is when you'll purchase the platform just for the app.

I think the new version of Iotum's Talk Now might qualify here, as I do not own a Blackberry, but am getting to the point where I would purchase one just to use Alec's service. Iotum's talk now takes presence from a number of connected users, and allows them to express the desire to speak with each other, and the presence to tell them when it's possible. Essentially, when you use this service, telephone tag goes way down, along with interruptions from those people you do most of your communicating with. Get the details here while I think of some way to convince my wife not to kill me for buying three phones in four months.