November 2005 Archives

If I was ever forced to retire and do something new with my life I might just choose a profession where I could help people protect themselves from electromagnetic fields. I would then do my best to stay out of Tom Keating’s blog.

Yes indeed Blackberry is up to their neck in, well you know. Their service is in jeopardy of being shut down in the US but few analysts think this will happen. They could be forced to spend a billion dollars to settle the dispute. Ouch.

In my conversation with Jerry Weinberger of Rates Technology earlier this year, he made a point to tell me that Canadian companies aren’t as concerned about US patents as they should be. I am paraphrasing a bit but that was the gist of what I remember.

He seems to be pretty correct. At least at this juncture.

Here are a few predictions Gartner makes for the future. Gartner’s pretty well-respected and their predictions carry a great deal of weight. My biggest concern is the point that is made in the report suggesting that companies are spending more on regulatory compliance and less on innovation. This is a chilling thought and should be a major concern for anyone concerned about effectively competing with companies from other countries.

If there is a bright side it is that smaller companies with less regulatory burden can still compete effectively as they have less paperwork and more time to be creative.

Here is an excerpt of the full story.

By 2008, 10 percent of companies will require employee-purchased notebooks. (“Gartner predicts that notebooks will begin to move from company ownership to personal ownership. Since notebook prices have declined dramatically during the past few years, this transition is mostly likely to be managed through the implementation of a notebook allowance, much like car mileage today.”)

The job market for IT specialists will shrink 40 percent by 2010. (“The coming decade will see the emergence of IT ‘versatilists,’ people whose multidisciplinary assignments, roles and experiences create a valuable blend of synthesized knowledge, competencies and context to fuel business value.”)

Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) service providers will capture $11 billion of insurance revenue by 2008. (“Gartner analysts predict that by 2008, BPO will have the intellectual property and technology platforms to align with the distribution channel - for example, bank and investment houses - and launch insurance ventures that capture up to one percent of the global annual premium total of life, annuity, and property and casualty products. Using the U.S. as an example, this translates into a shift of nearly $11 billion to BPO which will have a substantial impact on the market landscape.”)

A 50 percent growth in healthcare software investment could enable clinicians to cut the level of preventable deaths in half by 2013. (“Healthcare has historically underinvested in IT, however, this is changing. Gartner analysts predict that by 2009, healthcare investments in IT will increase by more than 50 percent, which could enable clinicians to reduce the level of preventable deaths by 50 percent by 2013.”)
Through 2008, investigation of new technologies will slow as discretionary budgets divert to regulatory compliance. (“Gartner analysts said that regulatory compliance spending is growing at a rate twice that of IT spending, and in many case, discretionary IT budgets are entirely consumed by compliance efforts, stifling initiatives that are important to business growth.”)

Apparently Israel is not blocking VoIP as originally reported.

High Density DVD wars… Keating details it in all its sweaty and bloody glory.

I agree with Russell on the 911 situation and how to solve it.

Service oriented architectures are something I have been writing more and more about recently. Expect SOA and communications to become more intricately intertwined. Announcements like this are great because it shows the massive amount of collaboration SOA is bringing to an industry of once closed and proprietary standards.

Here is an excerpt:

The SOA Programming Model specifications include the Service Component Architecture (SCA) to simplify the development of creating business services and Service Data Objects (SDO) for accessing data residing in multiple locations and formats.

SCA provides an open, technology neutral model for implementing IT services that are defined in terms of a business function and make middleware functions more accessible to the application developer.  SCA also provides a model for the assembly of business solutions from collections of individual services, with control over aspects of the solution such as access methods and security.   Vendors working to create SCA include BEA Systems, IBM, IONA, Oracle, SAP, Siebel and Sybase.

SDO complements SCA by providing a common way to access many different kinds of data. The specification reduces the skill levels and time required to access and manipulate business data. Today, a multitude of APIs are used to manipulate data.  These APIs tend to tightly couple the source and target of the data making their use error-prone and subject to breaking as business requirements evolve.  SDO makes it easier to use and realize the value of these APIs without having to code directly to them. 

Full Release:


SCA/SDO Industry Collaboration Launch
Draft Co-Developer Press Briefing Document: Version: 2005-Nov-29


IT Firms Create New Industry Specifications to Help SOA Application Development

November 30, 2005. . .BEA Systems, IBM Corporation, IONA Technologies, Oracle, SAP AG, Siebel Systems, Sybase and Xcalia today announced an effort to develop specifications and resulting collaborative technologies that simplify how organizations create and implement applications in a Service Oriented Architecture.     Using the SOA Programming Model specifications, organizations can more easily create new and transform existing IT assets into reusable services that may be rapidly adapted to meet changing business requirements. Further, the specifications greatly reduce complexity associated with developing applications by providing a way to unify services regardless of programming language and deployment platform.        

The specifications take advantage of an emerging trend called Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), which structures IT assets as a series of reusable services that perform business functions.  By structuring applications as a series of services, IT assets become more agile and organizations are better able to align their investments in dynamic business environments.  For example, using the specifications a mortgage lender can significantly reduce the complexity of automating the loan approval process by developing a set of interconnected “services” based on existing applications tying data on new home owners including credit reports to processes for ordering home appraisals and rate locking. As a result, the lender services more customers while providing more value.  In addition, by adopting these specifications organizations gain a higher degree of investment protection, because they can deploy services with a variety of middleware technologies. 

The SOA Programming Model specifications include the Service Component Architecture (SCA) to simplify the development of creating business services and Service Data Objects (SDO) for accessing data residing in multiple locations and formats.

SCA provides an open, technology neutral model for implementing IT services that are defined in terms of a business function and make middleware functions more accessible to the application developer.  SCA also provides a model for the assembly of business solutions from collections of individual services, with control over aspects of the solution such as access methods and security.   Vendors working to create SCA include BEA Systems, IBM, IONA, Oracle, SAP, Siebel and Sybase.

SDO complements SCA by providing a common way to access many different kinds of data. The specification reduces the skill levels and time required to access and manipulate business data. Today, a multitude of APIs are used to manipulate data.  These APIs tend to tightly couple the source and target of the data making their use error-prone and subject to breaking as business requirements evolve.  SDO makes it easier to use and realize the value of these APIs without having to code directly to them.  Vendors working to create SDO include BEA Systems, IBM, Oracle, SAP, Siebel, Sybase and Xcalia. 

SCA and SDO will be available royalty free and the authors are soliciting industry feedback.  Together they offer:

             A Language Neutral Assembly Model specification to simplify the development and usage of Business Services called: "Service Component Architecture"
             A Java Language specification for implementing SCA service components
             A C++ Language specification for implementing SCA service components
             A Java Language Service Data Objects specification describing a common rendering methodology for data exchange between clients and services
             A C++ Language Service Data Objects specification describing a common rendering methodology for data exchange between clients and services

“Service Infrastructure is a new category of software required for widespread adoption of SOA, It needs a rich ecosystem of technologies, standards, processes and partnerships to make it a reality. These new specifications – the first of their kind – represent significant progress in helping the industry achieve that goal,” said Edward Cobb, vice president, architecture and standards, BEA Systems. “ As an SOA leader, BEA will continue to drive standards in this area to ensure that the solid infrastructure we are providing supports composite applications from services developed on multiple platforms, using whatever technologies our customer choose.  Specifications such as SCA and SDO help developers spend less time on deployment and maintenance and more on solving business problems.

“Standards have become a critical component of today’s technology infrastructure,” said Karla Norsworthy, vice president, software standards, IBM Software.  “The rapid explosion of data and services has created challenges for developers to use all the new types of information.  The collection of companies joining forces to create SCA and SDO will help ease developer pain and increase business results.” 

“Because the SCA specification addresses significant marketplace and user requirements for SOA development and deployment infrastructure, it has the potential to unify service runtime and tooling initiatives such as ESBs and Eclipse,” said Eric Newcomer, CTO, IONA. “Our involvement as a co-author of the SCA specification is as a natural fit with IONA’s ongoing participation in standards-based and open source distributed computing initiatives.  Organizations adopting SOA need appropriate, efficient and cost-effective solutions.  Supporting industry standards such as SCA is one of the ways we are helping our customers accomplish this.”
 
 “Open standards and specifications such as Java Enterprise Edition, Web services and WS-BPEL play a crucial role in the development of Service-Oriented Architectures,” said Steven G. Harris, vice president, Java Platform Group, Oracle.  “Through our work in standards organizations and now in unifying those efforts in the SCA and SDO specifications, Oracle is making it easier for organizations to realize the concrete benefits a standards based Service-Oriented Architecture can deliver today and in the future.” 

“We are dedicated to working with other leading companies to establish standards that allow customers to compose applications from service and data components,” said Michael Bechauf, Vice President of SAP NetWeaver Industry Standards at SAP.  “Today’s announcement is another step forward in our commitment to help customers harness the power of Web services by leveraging the Enterprise Services Architecture (ESA), to optimize business processes and drive innovation through composite applications.”

We are really excited about our TMCnet in Español site. We are receiving much positive feedback on the content. For me, this endeavor is truly unusual as I cannot fully understand Spanish. I have a wonderful team of people that do of course speak the language but it is certainly exciting to be producing content in a foreign language that I can’t fluently speak.

What does this expansion mean for TMC? TMCnet is already the world’s most popular communications site and it is a natural extension for us to want to educate people in other languages as well. Somewhere around 600,000-700,000 unique visitors have come to TMCnet each of the past few months and our site is ranked in the top 2,400 in the world by Alexa.com (A division of Amazon.com).

More amazing is that TMCnet was ranked in the top 8,000 sites when we decided to start producing content in Spanish a few months back. We have moved 5,600 spots quite rapidly.

In addition to massive traffic we are also generating tremendous stickiness. In fact TMCnet averages 6.0 page views per visitor! This means on average each visitor looks at 6 pages per visit to TMCnet. This is unheard of for any news site I am aware of.

Page Views per user:

I was horrified to read on Tom Keating’s blog that Israel may soon be banning VoIP or doing its best to stop the progress of this technology. Israeli officials are not happy about the loss of revenue being attributed to VoIP but there are some things they aren’t taking into account.

For example, how much M&A activity in Israel in the past seven years has been a result VoIP and related technologies? How many VoIP engineers are working on VoIP products and services?

Everyone in the industry knows that armies of Israeli programmers are working VoIP. So many companies worldwide put their VoIP R&D labs in Israel in fact!

In my opinion if Israel takes on an anti-VoIP stance it will be disastrous for them from an employment perspective. How can the country that benefits perhaps the most from VoIP employment work to stop the adoption of the same technology? I hope this sentiment is reversed quickly.

Rumor has it SER is for sale and has $50 million in sales for the year. The sale makes good sense as a good part of the company’s inbound strategy was dependant on Aspect and now Aspect is owned by archrival Concerto (the company is now called Aspect Software).

SER has the absolute cream of the crop clients in the contact center space and this makes it a great buy. The downside is its overdependence on outbound which is seen as a negative.

Potential acquirers are likely Concerto of all people but don’t count out a fund who has investments in the call center space. Many funds are flowing with money and are looking for new places to invest. I would be interested in hearing any opinions on this rumored deal.

I stopped in the Apple store yesterday and was amazed at how many iPod Nanos they are selling. For the record I was in the Westchester Mall located in White Plains, New York and was tasked with buying a nano as a gift. I stood in line of ten people who almost all purchased Nanos. The devices were stacked neatly under the counter at the checkout of the store.

I reached the counter and said I wanted a Nano. The cashier asked 2 gig or 4 gig. I said. 4. He then said black or white. I said white. Done deal.

I also purchased the companion Bose SoundDock speaker system and was blown away that the Nano is so light and costs almost as much as the much heavier Bose system. I am sure both devices have a hefty mark up but when you carry them in separate shopping bags it seems amazing to pay so much for something so small. I felt like I had just come out of a jewelry store.

I was reminded of my weekend escapades when I read Tom’s blog mentioning the fact that you can get a free iPod Nano if you sign up for Internet Telephony Conference & Expo by December 2, 2005. That is Friday of this week!

The big FCC news today is a Wall Street Journal story reporting that the commission will soon suggest that cable companies offer their channels individually. A recent FCC report says that consumers could save money if they have the ability to choose which channels they want. The FCC is also pushing for themed tiers of channels allowing a customer for example to opt for a family-friendly tier.

Of course the FCC is not able to impose its will on the cable industry but such suggestions could embolden politicians to follow up on these recommendations with laws.

The cable industry argues that if many viewers were to drop channels aimed for example at children, the cost for these channels would have to rise for other consumers. Furthermore it may be possible that less money is available for the programming of such channels.

The problem here is that the channels with less interest are being subsidized by others that people want. Whenever this happens, there is waste that can be squeezed out of the system.

When I hear arguments like this it reminds me of the telecom market and how illogical the pricing structure of the industry has always been. For example having local calls that are usually free, interstate calls that are inexpensive and intrastate calls that are expensive just never made sense.

It just so happened that VoIP was able to take advantage of such screwed up pricing models and use it to its advantage. Now, ILECs have fixed rate pricing for all your calls.

I think the FCC is doing the right thing and it is in the consumer’s best interest to be able to purchase as many or few channels as they like. I also think that we will see more and more broadcasters beginning to stream their channels directly and bypass cable companies altogether.

When you look at the competitive environment, there is satellite, ILECs and the studios themselves. The one advantage the cable companies have is the access to large quantities of programming. In fact ILECs are at a disadvantage when offering programming as they don’t have access to all this content today.

The question is, will offering channels individually bring more business to cable companies or less? The answer may be more. I don’t have reams of research to support my opinion but past experience tells me that consumers given choice become happier with the company they are dealing with.

That is in the short term. In the end the TV distribution companies are going to have to fight it out with the content providers themselves. ESPN for example is in a position to become its own distribution company. Since they are owned by Disney, this is all the more reason for Disney to start dabbling with providing more content direct to consumers.

And herein lies the concern for cable companies. Imagine if the content providers realize customers are willing to pay a certain amount of money each month for their content. They of course may decide to offer the content themselves and eventually bypass cable companies altogether or offer the cable companies the same content at ridiculously low margins.

You may have seen an Intel WiFi demo area at an airport or in some major metropolitan areas. Microsoft too has set up these areas for people to come and use WiFi while simultaneously learning about the company's products and services.

Bearing this in mind it might not be so surprising to hear Google too has set up such areas in the Heathrow Airport in London. Since Google now gets the opportunity to see their customers live they can ask questions and take surveys. For example, they can find out what people do when they travel. Are they productive?

The results of Google's survey shows the average airline passenger wastes a day's holiday a year waiting around in airports, some nine hours in total.

Chief among passengers' interests if they had internet access is to find out more about their destination (71 per cent), while a quarter wanted to fire off last minute emails and a fifth wanted to pay bills. Full story.