It's surprising how often some things get reinvented. It's even more surprising how determined people are to
use unlikely systems/services for social networking. Do you remember (online) daily-updated mailing-lists?
Fixing email is a long-term quest. Maybe even longer than the Jackson's Director cut of LOTR. With the future of Bloomba somewhat of a mystery, I'm getting my head around some new ideas in messaging. Of course, as we've learned in email over the last few years (Bloomba, MailBlocks, Matador, Affini), every attempt at creating a better email product has to start at stopping spam. Having recently sounded off on the community approach to spam, best exemplified by Affini (www.affini.com), I found this interesting little program the other day -- has anyone here of POPFile (popfile.sourceforge.net)?
Thanks to radio commercials utilizing music and production from Scott G (The G-Man), electro-pop music is playing to radio audiences who are not usually exposed to this style.
Ein Experiment: Beim Thema Globalisierung wird es schwierig. So richtig unangenehm. Haben wir uns überhaupt bereits die wichtigsten Fragen gestellt?
*Translation on request... :-)
Cisco has long been known as a reliable pipe, but now it's expanding its vision of what it can do, and working to become a bona fide platform. Does this make sense?
This past fall, the venerable Churchill Club hosted an in-depth panel on the state of innovation in the enterprise IT sector. Moderator Geoffrey Moore, of Mohr, Davidow Ventures, called on four industry veterans to defend why they think that their technology is the basis for a new platform. Moore kicked off the panel discussion by asking Don Proctor, vice president and general manager of the Voice Technology Group at Cisco, a simple question: why does Cisco think the networking layer is going to be a platform?
Moore: Don, I'm going to start with you. In what sense is there a platform opportunity for Cisco?
Proctor: What we've observed is that over the past decade or so, the tasks that enterprise users are asking of their network have really evolved. So at Cisco, we've gone from being primarily a connectivity company to a company that is really more about enabling services. We see the network beginning to evolve into a services delivery platform rather than just dumb connectivity. You don't really need to look much further than our publicly articulated strategy to see how we're approaching that market.
Cisco's strategy today is really based on investment in a couple of key areas. We have our core technologies—the routing and switching technologies that most people know us for—which remain the lion's share of our business. But several years ago we also started placing strategic bets on a limited number of advanced technologies, and those advanced technologies are all about enabling the platform.
Technologies like optical are extending the platform down the protocol stack, and developments like WiFi and the home network are expanding the platform horizontally. Then a couple of technologies that are actually expanding the platform up the protocol stack are security and storage networking, and voice technologies, which I'm responsible for at Cisco. We're really making the network a more intelligent mechanism for delivering services.
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Moore: So if I'm a CIO, five years from now will I think about my enterprise IT architecture in a different way in order to take advantage of this platform?
Proctor: Here's what I'm hearing from CIOs: the way that we think about this fundamental connectivity trend called convergence has changed quite a bit over the past few years. Even just five years ago, when we talked about convergence, the value proposition for CIOs was in consolidating the media layer, consolidating layers one and two of the protocol stack, and really providing a single physical infrastructure for transmitting different kinds of information, whether it was voice, video, or data.
As the technologies matured, we started seeing that convergence move up to the network, where we now have the ability to, for example, use intelligence in the network to make intelligent call routing decisions or to set up video communications or to enable different kinds of unified messaging. Today what I hear from CIOs is that it's not just about minimizing op ex, it's about minimizing op ex and driving the top line. And this is quite different when you think about the typical role of a CIO. Today we're hearing more and more requests not only to help manage costs, but also to help drive productivity, help enable business process transformation, help drive a higher level of competitive advantage.
It's as if that fundamental concept of convergence is moving all the way up into the things that the end user touches, collaboration environments. We call it immersive communications: being able to enter a business communications environment and send or retrieve a voicemail message or an e-mail message, or start a meeting or a conference call or a web collaboration session—all from a single interactive environment that makes the end user more productive.
Moore: Okay, the question I want to ask is: who do you think would be the most important player in the industry to collaborate with? Who is your most important ally, if you will, in making this vision happen?
Proctor: It's a tough question, because we have a lot of partners in the industry and they are quite strategic in a number of areas. If I were to answer the question broadly, I'd have to say that one of our most important partnerships is the one we have with IBM. I say that only because it is both a technology partnership and a "go to market" partnership. The way we collaborate with the IBMs of the world is twofold: we're a consumer of their core technology and they're a very important channel for our products. They handle a business that Cisco isn't in, by performing the system integration delivery for customers.
Moore: Who do you think your strategy is most threatening to?
Proctor: It's really about infrastructure. In my business, we talk about the NELAS and the NANAS. The NELAS are the traditional service provider voice companies, like Nortel, Ericcson, Lucent, Alcatel, and Siemens. The NANAS are a similar group: Nortel, Avaya, NEC, Alcatel and Siemens. From a voice perspective, we see those two groups as the primary competitors.
Moore: If you start moving up the stack, I'm wondering if you're going to make EMC and IBM uncomfortable.
Proctor: I would draw this distinction: the way that we are building the platform for services like storage is quite different from how we're building the platform for services like voice. In the case of storage, there's a tremendous amount of intellectual property, not only in the physical storage, but also the storage management. It's this document management dimension that EMC is moving into, whereas Cisco is not in the management of shared data. We're really providing more of a network layer virtualization service, in order to enhance the value proposition of taking storage into the network, accessible to users irrespective of geographic location.
On the voice side, it's a similar proposition. We're removing the requirement of time and space, going from a paradigm that says you need a box in the basement to one that says you need a service in the network. Now in this case, when you remove the switching fabric from a traditional PBX, for example, and you remove the control logic that sets up the calls and you remove the end points because they're going to IP, then there's nothing left.
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