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 I don’t know about you, but I can’t believe how much market activity we’re seeing in communications software these days versus the situation of a year ago. It’s enough to drive our engineering and product managers into a synaptic meltdown, given the presales and early project delivery demands. It’s about time. I ran an interesting google trends search this afternoon, which ranks, in simple relative terms, the number of times “telecommunications” has been used as a search term, starting in 2004 and ending today. Search frequency has dropped by about 75% over that period. In other words, the average schmo is about a quarter as likely to satisfy some level of curiosity about telecommunications as he was five years ago. Telecom Search Term Trend Tiger Woods Search Term Trend By comparison, searches for “Tiger Woods” have grown more popular by about 750%. Particularly in the last two weeks. Go figure. So based on our own small sample of interest in things telecom, I’m compiling a list of the top ten reasons why I believe telecom is at an inflection point — a very interesting one at that — and why the google trend curve for 2010-2015 (or whatever replaces it from the google labs) will look much like a mirror image of the 2004-2009 version. I’ll post the first five of these today, and follow up in the next few days with the remainder. Number 10: Mobile data demand drivers will force a business paradigm shift. All-you-can-eat data may be becoming unaffordable (see the interesting article by John Paczkowski in All Things Digital ). It’s going to get worse with video. Someone’s going to have to pay for all the upgrades and new backhaul. The people with expensive unlimited data plans (the kind of people who write news articles and blog a lot) aren’t going to like it. Number 9: The mainstreaming of VoIP and multimedia will force a technical and architectural paradigm shift. The IMS platforms that are rolling out to deliver VoIP and other services work in the lab, but they aren’t ready for prime time operations. The management tools aren’t there yet. Demand for new tools and new methods and procedures is going to fuel innovation and new entrants. Some of the new kids are going to be newsworthy success stories. Number 8: One or more major service provider networks will suffer a catastrophic security breach. It’s going to make big news, spur bloviating politicians to hold Very Important Hearings, and refocus attention on securing the net. The vulnerabilities — either in the internet or in closed service provider networks — are just too glaring to ignore. Some bozo hijacking a Tier I network will make good fodder for 60 Minutes. Number 7: The US industry is ripe for reregulation. The Obama Department of Justice was widely rumored in July of this year to be investigating antitrust violations in US telecommunications. The long silence since then may be an indication that the rumors were greatly exaggerated, but whether in antitrust enforcement or in new net neutrality regulation , the long arm of the law is about to get longer. Lawyers, rejoice. Number 6: The intersection of Google, Apple, and global service providers like AT&T, Verizon, and Vodafone is going to force a restructuring of players and roles. The hunger for content and advertising revenue, the interdependencies among the networks, platforms, and developers, and the extremely capital-intensive nature of the needed new infrastructure will force a historic realignment. The “communications service provider” of 2009 will be unrecognizable in a few short years. to be continued… -
Lately we have been seeing a huge spike in interest for a variety of applications that manage large numbers of widely distributed intelligent devices in a variety of new broadband networks. One of our partners, Accedian recently put a Nakina application into a US wireless carrier to manage turn-up and test for a large rollout of Ethernet NIDs in a backhaul application; in an another, a top equipment vendor has begun implementing a Nakina Resource Optimization (parameter management) solution for a national IMS rollout supporting consumer VoIP. There are a lot of other cases that can’t yet be disclosed publicly, but they all involve management of networks that are undergoing various stages of disaggregation. In the consumer VoIP example, over 20 individual classes of network element (media gateway controllers, routers, access managers, etc.), deployed in multiple instances, replace a single centralized switch. The new architecture is vastly more flexible, and takes advantage of the inherent efficiencies of packet-based transport, but the flexibility and efficiency come at a cost in terms of increased management complexity. Rev levels, patches, parameter settings, backups, and security in the disaggregated environment can’t be managed without new infrastructure and new methods, and these are often improvised at rollout rather than being baked into the plan. ( photo credit: http://www.computerhistory.org/) It strikes me that what we’re seeing among service providers — and in the management systems that support them — has a lot in common with the evolution of enterprise computer and network architectures — in fact, it’s nothing more than a delayed reflection, played out in an industry that has vastly longer investment cycles and vastly slower technical evolution. The movement out of the 1970s mainframe-centric world and into the ‘peer-to-peer’ minicomputer networking world of the 1980s (the origin of the internet) and then further into the evolution of ubiquitous computing in the 90s and 00s, gave rise to a whole new multibillion dollar industry devoted to management support — network management, PC desktop management, server system administration, and so forth. It created an opportunity for rapid development of hundreds of companies, many of which became billion dollar plus players (CA, IBM’s Tivoli, and BMC for example). We’re still in the early days of a massive transformation from a ‘mainframe’ era of telecommunications into a disaggregated era — based on IMS, LTE, IPTV, femtocells, and ethernet transport (to name only a few examples), with content and service originating from millions of endpoints around the network, not radiating out from its center. It’s time for a new ‘operations software foundry’ to start forging the tools and building the machines that will empower that transformation.
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