THE PULVER REPORT: The October 21, 1999 Issue:
In this Issue:
Heard on the Net
October '99 seems to be "transitional" month for jobs in the VON Industry. Some friends have privately announced their departure. I will be posting their news next month after they are settled in at their new positions.
September '99 saw the successful IPO of ITXC and the S-1 filings of additional companies in the VON space which are slated to go public later this year.
For up-to-date VON Industry news - please fee free to visit ( http://pulver.com/news
). If you have news which you would like to see posted - please email: editor@pulver.com.
Notes from Fall '99 Voice on the Net
Fall '99 Voice on the Net took place in Atlanta, GA during the week of
September 27, 1999. Presentations from the conference are now available at (http://pulver.com/von99/fall99/request.htm
).
For many of the attending conference delegates and exhibiting vendors, Fall '99 VON created an environment that was both content and contact rich. For the exhibitors, this meant that the people who visited their booths and/or hospitality suites included potential inventors, business partners, customers, new employees as well as competitors.
Watching the activity of the show floor and the tables in the hallways, one could see the business of VON going on. Many organizations took advantage of the conference by holding meetings and getting together with friends in the business. On the first day of the conference, we (and the Cobb Galleria) experienced our first "VON Unplugged". It was amazing to hear the clever ways our dynamic speakers presented themselves in each of the breakout sessions in spite of the sudden darkness.
There were three prominent themes from Fall '99 VON which I found interesting: "Services", SIP/MGCP and Wall Streets continued interest in the VON Industry. In addition, I'm personally convinced that it will be the technologies surrounding Instant Messaging and Presence Management that will be the true "killer app" for service providers who have invested in IP based communication networks.
From some of the Industry Perspectives, there was a strong emphasis on services. These "services" were not specifically static services, but services that were enabled and managed by the end user. To me, this means we will be seeing the opportunity for what I will call "The Personal Central Office".
The Personal Central Office (CO) will allow the end user/customer to control calls and enable applications. It may even be like a CO because it routes calls between multiple devices. Imagine if you could drag and drop the mobile phone icon on your PC or Palm Pilot to the Home Phone icon and dynamically transfer a call in progress from your mobile phone to home phone or maybe drag and drop the mobile phone icon to the PBX icon and dynamically transfer a call in progress from your mobile phone to your office phone.
Enabling these technologies is the work being done by the VON industry to develop Service Creation Environments. At our first VON Developer's conference on October 1st we started looking at the ways we can enable rapid application development. (Presentations from the Developers Conference are available at: http://pulver.com/von99/fall99/developers/request.htm )
Theme #2 - SIP & Megaco/MGCP. For me, Fall '99 VON is the VON where "SIP Really Happened". If you are responsible for building products in the VON industry, you will be making a major mistake if your plans for 2000/2001 don't include support for SIP and Megaco. H.323 most likely will be around forever in endpoints, but don't expect H.323 to reside inside many of the next generation trunking switches. Some of the major telcos have already announced their support for SIP and Call Agents and expect other carriers to follow the lead of these carriers
. Theme #3 - Wall Street's continued interest in the VON Industry.
"Follow the Money" will continue to be the VON Mantra. As the Trillion Dollar PSTN industry continues to feed on its VON initiatives, look for Investors to be there to provide the capital needed to take a vision and turn it into a deliverable. IPOs, Mergers and Acquisitions and Large Implementation contracts have all made recent news with the dollars in tens (or hundreds) of millions. The end result is that the industry has discovered that it needs to be at a higher level. As a result, you should look for: (a) more IPOs even if it means launching a separate company to benefit from Wall Street, (b) more big guys to absorb little guys in an effort to integrate the broad skill sets needed for new integrated devices, and (c) more companies to announce alliances with large systems integration houses.
During Fall '99 VON, we also saw that SS7 functionality is being integrated into most of the industry and how the cable industry in particular is using VON to provide full connectivity to the PSTN. The packetcable specifications were recently completed just before Fall '99 VON and are available now from the CableLabs' site ( http://www.packetcable.com ).
Other efforts have also been working on interoperability. This includes our own Open Test Network ( http://pulver.com/testnetwork ). At the show, with thanks to Sheri Jenkins of GTE and her partners at Cisco, Motorola, Vsys, we had displayed full SS7/IP functionality on the Open Test Network. Please see the Open Test Network website for a slide which describes in detail the technology demo we had at the show. With the help of Sheri and GTE, SS7 functionality will be available at our Melville office and will benefit all participants of our Open Test Network. With regard to the companies which contributed to the success of the Open Test Network in Atlanta, 8x8, Columbia University, dynamicsoft, Mediatrix, and especially Nortel Networks deserve thanks for their demonstration of SIP Interoperability at Fall '99 VON.
A special thanks also goes out to Ericsson for providing the Open Test Network with our first switch - an MD110 which was needed and critical for the SS7/IP Demo to take place on the Open Test Network. For those of you who would like to participate in the Open Test Network at Spring '2000 VON, please feel free to email: Carl Ford (carl@pulver.com).
I've just started working on the schedule and sessions for Spring '2000 VON which will be taking place March 27-30, 2000 at the San Jose Convention Center. I would appreciate it if you could email me (jeff@pulver.com) your suggestions for the content which you would like to see covered in San Jose. Our formal "call for speakers" is open now and the deadline for submitting speaking proposals is November 12th. Please feel free to submit your speaking proposal to: ( http://pulver.com/speak ).
We have a limited number of exhibit booths available to new VON exhibitors.
If you are looking to exhibit, please visit ( http://pulver.com/von99/fall99/exhibit.html
).
The Effects of Hurricane Floyd and the Myth of the Five Nines
A few pulver.com employees were recently stuck in a third world country
called "New Jersey". To be fair, it was the result of Hurricane Floyd. But,
Northern New Jersey not only lost the five nines of reliability, it lost the
one of the nines to the left of the decimal point! This just wasn't for long
distance service, but rather it was for connecting to the Internet and the wireless
interconnections points including AT&T and Sprint. The outage also effected
the ATM banking system.
Normally, when you have a disaster, some part of the phone network survives. For example, A major earthquake struck San Francisco during the '89 World Series yet report after report was able to be filed using phones. A local town facility got wiped out, but connectivity was still available to the outside world. With the recent case of Hurricane Floyd and Northern New Jersey residents, connectivity to the outside world was not available to over 1 Million subscribers.
What I find perplexing is that this event generated little national press. Sure the Senators and Congressman vowed an investigation (we've asked to be briefed) but so far nothing formal has been set up. And it's a shame, because I'm personally aware of people within the VON industry who have been working on solutions that if they had been implemented in a distributed architecture, would have reduced the outage, if not eliminated the problem entirely. [Note: this doesn't assume that a nextgen tamdem switch from Salix or Sonus will operate under nine feet of water either.]
An important point to remember is that the "Flaw of the Internet" according to the Switched world is its lack of guaranteed performance. However, it seems to me that the Internets' strength is its redundancy and for all the talk of the Nines, the network is only as good as its weakest point.
I would be curious as to what people from the Switched World would say was
the weak point this time - besides the myopia of contingency planning. I'm also
wondering how many other switch locations around the United States would be
effected given similar circumstances.
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