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A very interesting study on the rise of “Apps Culture” has just been published by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. My day job doesn’t afford me the time to read more than the synopsis and a few choice bits further down the page, but there are some thought-provoking data points here. [...]

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.