Communications and Technology Blog - Tehrani.com - Cisco Archives

Metaswitch Clearwater: Game Changing Open Source IMS Initiative

2013-05-08T12:20:23Z

The march to a software telco world is progressing nicely

Communications service providers are at war with OTT providers and need to ensure they are able to battle on as level a playing field as possible. There are significant costs associated with running a major telco and hardware infrastructure certainly ranks high among them. Sure, OTT providers like Skype and WhatsApp have infrastructure costs as well but they often leverage standard servers and software to achieve their goals. Contrast this to a telecom operator who typically buys proprietary equipment from a number of specialized manufacturers. The difference in costs between these approaches is quite steep.

This is of course is why carriers are pushing equipment providers to provide all of the network functions they supply in software which will run in virtualized instances on off-the-shelf servers. It also explains what ETSI network functions virtualization or NFV is all about and Metaswitch Networks has been on the forefront of this trend and hopes to ride the wave into larger carriers worldwide.

To further this push from hardware into software, the company recently announced Project Clearwater which takes the components of IMS and runs them on standard servers in an open-source manner. A number of carriers have leveraged open-source Asterisk in the past to provide telephony service to their customers, now they and others can take advantage of this new initiative to provide open-source IMS as well.

One of the main reasons carriers want to shift their network functions to software is it allows them to select products from a wider variety of vendors. The reason has to do with the costs of developing telephony hardware for carriers. You need phenomenally deep pockets and lots of patience to sell to carriers as an upstart hardware provider. As a result, an amazing number of equipment companies have gone belly up waiting to become adopted by telcos worldwide. Software on the other hand has less cost associated with it meaning a potentially higher likelihood of success.

Still, telcos can never be too cautious choosing a company to base their network on. One of the benefits of going with an open-source project is you no longer need to worry about one company to support it.

I spoke at length with CTO Martin Taylor and he tells me they learned a great deal from the efforts of many of the players in the social networking and cloud space and took the best ideas from these players and applied them to a SIP centric IMS network. Some things they learned and applied were using DNS as a load balancing technique as well as building massively scalable and resilient solutions in a low-cost manner.

How low cost you ask? Well, I am glad you did. Taylor says about 2 cents per subscriber per year based on the costs of AWS. Of course the solution is not dependent on Amazon, but this is just a guideline to consider. Moreover, this cost covers core plumbing of voice, video and messaging… You would still need an SBC, telephony app servers, messaging app servers and media gateways.

He further explained that carriers who are looking to deploy RCS know they have compete with OTT providers and being able to lower the cost of IMS is a huge help in doing so.

Metaswitch will supply support and bug fixes for the project. Taylor exclaimed, “Charging for peace of mind really is what it boils down to.” This and supplying additional solutions is how the company hopes to monetize this new initiative which is free for telcos to use.

This news is a potential game changer for telecom. Carriers once had to grapple with whether to purchase their IMS solutions from the US, Europe or Chinese equipment providers… Now they have the option of trying a software-centric, open-source approach. They can even try this solution in tandem with other trials going on in their labs.

Be sure to learn everything there is to know about NFV and the birth of the software telco at Software Telco Congress, Nov 19-21, 2013 in Santa Clara, Ca.

Aruba Networks Shows WiFi Can Boost Retail Traffic

2013-03-05T17:14:28Z

Aruba Networks had a few interesting announcements recently at Mobile World Congress 2013 and the first one shows how WiFi can be used as a differentiator and driver of retail traffic. In a deployment with NTT Broadband Platform or NTTBP the companies proudly unveiled the fact they are deploying a joint WIFi solution named Wi-Fi Cloud Services and its being deployed at over 10,000 Seven-Eleven locations as well as other retail locations owned by the mutual parent company in Japan.

This is important because the service includes an offering to consumers which allows them to come to the stores and download and stream music and other content. In this way the WiFi network supports a marketing initiative which makes the stores in-effect more "sticky."

As the content is the "hook" so to speak, it is imperative the quality of the network is up to par. In other words if a dozen people jump on this carrier-agnostic network and initiate applications or services which demand large amounts of bandwidth, there is the potential for the quality of the promoted content to suffer.

As Ben Gibson (pictured), CMO explained to me - this is where the 7200 Mobility Controller comes in. The granular access policy management based on user, device, application and location means the system can determine which traffic is of high value and needs QoS. Other traffic unrelated to the offer can connect directly to the Internet and be handled in a best-effort manner.

Moreover, he touted Aruba Activate - the company's solution which allows access points to auto-configure without the need for manual intervention.

Other news the company broke at the show had to do once again with the 7200 (pictured) - this time its ability to provide managed services and cellular offload. The company in its news release touted its solution as 40 times lower in capital cost, 14 times lower in power consumption and one-third the rack space of "competitive offerings" which is typically the code phrase for Cisco.

He further explained Aruba's HybridControl WiFi architecture allows a carrier to support more than 32,000 WiFi hotspots with a single controller.

What is interesting to me is the way QoS-enabled WiFi is being used as a marketing tool to drive traffic to brick and mortar stores. We know Starbucks was a pioneer in providing free WiFi but when a cup of coffee you sell can cost more than five times more than the competition, its easy to justify the price of free broadband.

For other retail stores we may start to see more promotional services possibly in combination with record companies, artists, movie studies and television content creators. The point is, WiFi may go from being an afterthought in retail to a strategic asset which drives micro-communities of real breathing human beings who purchase products at a cash register.

Technology has disrupted traditional retail allowing consumers to buy via apps and browsers... Perhaps now it will like a boomerang be utilized broadly to get those same consumers more interested in not only visiting but spending time in malls, convenience stores and other non-virtual locations.

How Steve Jobs Even Transformed Our Views on Management

2013-02-09T19:23:24Z

Steve Jobs was such an amazing entrepreneur - even calling him the ultimate visionary doesn't seem to describe accurately how amazing he was at reinventing numerous business categories. Like so many creative visionaries, early in his career he lacked the political and people skills which many people believed were necessary to run a company effectively.

When he was "pushed out" of Apple it was seen as a normal incident - CEOs were pushed out of companies all the time as past Apple CEO John Sculley has said. In fact Scully spoke just over a week ago at StartUp Camp7 collocated with ITEXPO Miami 2013 and gave the inside scoop on many important events which transpired between him and Jobs over the years.

What is interesting though is how Sculley defends Jobs and says it was a mistake to push him out. It seems John's view on management and entrepreneurship has changed over the years and others are beginning to agree with him. In fact, changing the view of the founder-CEO is just one other massive accomplishment Steve Jobs should get credit for. As if his list of accomplishments was somehow lacking until now.

Throughout my career the common knowledge has always been entrepreneurs can't run companies - at some point you need to bring in a real manager who can run operations.

Common knowledge seems to have changed recently and Jessi Hempel writes a compelling article for Fortune which makes the case for having the founder run the company.

The article does lead with a statistic which seems to make the opposite case though:

Harvard Business School professor Noam Wasserman has spent the past decade studying the impact a founder has on a company. In a study of 460 American startups, he found that on average those in which founding CEOs remained the top decision-makers were less valuable than those managed by outside CEOs. Simply put, the skills needed to invent a new product or service are different from those needed to manage a business, and few people possess both.

The interesting twist however is while the outside manager is better at running a company on a day-to-day basis, they are far less creative than a founder and in-fact almost every company which has become uber-successful has been run by a founder.

Reid Hoffman the co-founder of Linked In explains in-part why there has been a shift in thinking:

20 years ago, you could count on product cycles lasting years, which meant that constantly developing new products and refining the vision was relatively less important than aggressive execution. The “professional” CEO back then just had to be a superb executor for the founder’s vision. The rise of internet time has reduced product cycles to months and weeks. As such, a CEO can’t focus solely on scaling concerns—today, the CEO has to be involved in the product.

Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz details his thoughts on the matter in a piece titled Why We Prefer Founding CEOs and it describes how today [constant] innovation = [the best chance of] success. If we take it as a given that entrepreneurs are best able to innovate then it becomes a given that a "professional CEO" isn't the right person to guide a company forward.

This part of the post sums it up best:

The reason is that innovation is the most difficult core competency to build in any business. Innovation is almost insane by definition: most people view any truly innovative idea as stupid, because if it was a good idea, somebody would have already done it. So, the innovator is guaranteed to have more natural initial detractors than followers.

Moreover he says these are the three ingredients to being a great innovator:

Comprehensive knowledge
Moral authority
Total commitment to the long-term

Here is another great point he makes:

Founding CEOs naturally take a long view of their companies. The company is their life’s work. Their emotional commitment exceeds their equity stake. Their goal from the start is to build something significant. They instinctively know that big product cycles come from investment and that even the biggest product cycles will eventually fade. Professional CEOs, on the other hand, tend to be driven by relatively shorter-term goals. They are paid in terms of stock options that vest over 4 years and cash bonuses for quarterly and yearly performance.

One other idea he brings up worth discussing is that Eric Schmidt is an important exception to the rule as a "professional CEO" he came to Google and launched Apps and Android. He did so by, "teaming with the founders and gaining the benefits of their knowledge, moral authority, and long-term vision." He continues to say this is an obvious strategy, but shared leadership and control are incredibly difficult to achieve." he further describes what is needed to make it work: "Intense communication, deep humility, and some hard compromises." Of course he conludes by reminding us that almost nobody ever pulls it off, making Eric Schmidt a very important exception.

What we learn from the above is professional CEOs need to be humble and able to communicate well to be successful in business today. My personal experience has shown me many entrepreneur CEOs while very creative are pretty bad at the "business side" of the job. This is in-part why most of them fail - something we should keep in mind. Yes, the great companies are run by their founders but remember, most new companies do fail.

This tells us that CEOs who aren't very effective at doing the non-creative part of the CEO job - running meetings, managing, etc should bring in someone to assist. That is if they want to maximize the value of their company. When interviewing such a person they should be sure to look for someone who is able to admit past mistakes and who learned from them. I would go so far as asking them to list their top three mistakes and ask what was learned from each.

Another thought which comes to mind is this change in "founder philosophy" sums up why in-part Amazon's shares trade at an exponentially-higher multiple than those of Apple. Something I have discussed before.

We know that finding another Jobs, Zuckerberg or Bezos is rare and we also know if we can team more professional CEOs who don't think they know it all with some creative founders, we can unlock tons of value in a slew of companies. Of course the founders would need to realize their shortcomings in order to allow such a "partnership." Hopefully this will happen as word gets out about how Jobs and Sculley worked side-by-side and moreover how much of Apple's success today (especially in product design and marketing) came from that initial collaboration between a founder and solid "professional CEO."

To me it is fascinating to see how "common knowledge" about the ongoing ability of a founder to run the company has changed because we are in an age of acceleration. In other words, the shortcomings of the CEO from a management perspective have become less important because a well-managed company without innovation will get eaten alive by its competitors. The situation with John Sculley of course is an extreme example and shows how their relationship and poor decisions made by the board at the time have helped lead to a change in thinking about the importance in keeping a founder at the helm. Moreover as we can see from Amazon's P/E multiple, the investment community definitely agrees.

Belkin Buys Linksys from Cisco

2013-01-25T01:08:52Z

In a continuation of Cisco exiting the consumer market, the networking giant has announced it has sold this division to competitor Belkin for an undisclosed amount. Belkin will continue to honor all valid warranties and will now own about 30% of the U.S. retail home and small business networking market.

Cisco has had many failures in the consumer market for an obvious reason. They are in the business of selling expensive products to IT managers in large, medium and small companies where the margins are far better than they are in the consumer electronics space.

A past example of failure is the Cius tablet which was discontinued. Before I even saw it I said the following:

The downside risk is fairly obvious though and that is that software is cheaper than hardware and most anything the Cius can do, an iPad or other Android tablet can as well.
And then there is the consumer electronics angle - Cisco purchased Flip and shut it down a few years later because the company isn't very good at competing in the consumer space where margins are razor-thin. Obviously the growth of smartphones helped kill the pocket-sized video camcorder market as well.

Then there was Umi telepresence which I predicted would fail as soon as I heard about it.

Cisco has gotten its mojo back lately and even though its having problems in its video business, it seems to be on solid footing as competitors like HP and Dell are strugging. Of course IBM is doing great and Huawei and ZTE still are formidable.

So the news here for consumers is great as Linksys is back in the hands of a company that gets consumers. Subsequently Cisco has more time to focus on acquiring and/or developing new products for the enterprise and carrier networks.

Whoops: Cisco Sued by Customer over Slogan

2013-01-14T20:50:27Z

Tomorrow Starts Here is a pretty catchy slogan – so catchy that it’s the reason Cisco is being sued by its customer East Carolina University. In 2003 ECU was so happy with Cisco they allowed the networking leader to use them as a case study for their Aironet Wireless 1400 Series Wireless Bridge (PDF). But things took a turn for the worse when Cisco decided to brand itself with a new slogan “Tomorrow Starts Here.”

According to Reuters: The U.S. university said on Friday that it is seeking damages for unauthorized use of the trademark, which it said is "a university-wide brand that represents an overlapping field of goods and services when compared with that of Cisco".

Cisco for its part says it is surprised by the lawsuit which to some degree makes sense as it isn’t common for a university to sue a network equipment maker for a trademark. After all, these organizations aren’t competitive. Still, if you are trying to brand yourself, you don’t want another company using your slogan if at all possible. Especially not a company with deep enough pockets to make it seem like you are ripping off their intellectual property.

The court case will likely settle with Cisco offering a mix of cash and equipment and/or services. It’s worth noting if you Google Tomorrow Starts Here –cisco there is no question this is a slogan widely used by ECU as the video below proves. The “-cisco” removes results related to Cisco which are now overshadowing the ECU links which were once dominant.

Who Should Buy Linksys and how does the Cloud fit in?

2012-12-17T22:32:28Z

Cisco recently appointed Barclays to help it auction off Linksys – a move consistent with the company’s desire to exit low-margin consumer businesses as it looks to invest in high-margin areas like software and services. But as the saying goes, one man’s garbage is another man’s gold. Linksys is indeed a treasure to the right partner like Google or even Samsung.

The reason is simple – both companies need to blunt the move by Apple into the home and entertainment is the future of technology as consumer technology trends coupled with BYOD turn into corporate success. When the iPhone first came out CEO after CEO explained to me patiently about how they could never abandon RIM and that the iPhone would never be secure enough for their IT departments to sanction.

Well, that was a short wait as a few years later RIM is gasping for air and even mighty Microsoft is trying to figure out how to get people to buy its mobile products.

As Apple invades the living room further with its rumored new TV solution – whatever it may be, the defensive strategy of its competition has to be to get into the home via an adjacent method and leverage this success with add-on solutions. Of course the acquisition of Scientific Atlanta by Cisco coupled with Linksys was in-theory going to do the same thing except the cable and telecom companies stood in-between Cisco and its customers meaning the leading networking company wasn’t going to come out with an OTT television solution.

The question is – who should buy Linksys and the answer to me seems to be anyone who needs to compete with Apple. Aside from Google and Samsung, let’s be sure we add Microsoft to the list as well. Imagine what they can do with Linksys and Skype integration – coupled of course with Lync and Xbox. This combo would certainly make the company even more powerful in the world of VoIP/IP communications.

Then there are the cloud vendors – there is a natural fit between products and services these days – Amazon has shown us that software can and will subsidize hardware. In its case, a suite of cloud services and apps are there to increase consumer spending on products in the Amazon ecosystem.

Google with its Chromebooks gives away lots of cloud services in the hopes customers will buy more. Expect this trend to extend across hardware in general meaning companies like Carbonite and Mozy may look at Linksys as a way to get consumers to use their services on a trial basis.

In a way, both of these companies can justify the purchase of Linksys by subsequently cutting their marketing budgets as the sale of each router and other consumer electronics product bundled with a free trial is effectively the same as the result of advertising on radio, TV or the web.

Finally, there is Dell and HP – I can’t imagine either company successfully pulling off such a merger but the synergies between consumer printing, computing and networking are too obvious to ignore. Moreover there are a slew of Asian vendors – many in China who could take the Linksys brand and use it to introduce a number of new products which would have immediate name recognition in the US. Lenovo leveraged IBM at first to do something similar – I imagine in my scenario a Chinese manufacturer renaming itself as opposed to the other way around. Of course the US government may have something to say about such a move from China but then again being a consumer play, Linksys may not get much attention from the feds looking to keep our communications networks safe.

Either way the biggest opportunity for growth for Linksys seems to be the melding of hardware with cloud services such as storage, audio and video. Apple and Amazon are pulling this off brilliantly and it seems to me the future of commodity hardware will be using it to push a surrounding ecosystem. In a way consumers can thank the cloud for adding more value to the products they buy and for its ability to subsidize hardware in order to make upfront costs more attractive.

Avaya and Mitel Cross at Canadian Border

2012-11-16T18:59:51Z

New Jersey-based Avaya, spun out of Lucent and previously AT&T has a decades-long history of providing business communications solutions. With its purchase of Nortel’s business communications assets a few years back it picked up even more knowledge, know-how and relationships. Mitel, the Kanata, Ontario-based global business communications company cofounded in 1973 by Sir Terry Matthews is known for delivering superior technology. More recently Mitel has become publicly traded and acts sort of as a partner to the dozens of Sir Terry Matthews’s companies under the Wesley Clover Brand.

Avaya and Mitel do compete to some degree but Mitel is known more for small to medium systems while Avaya is known as the big-leagues supplier. Cisco has been a major competitor taking share from Avaya this past decade while ShoreTel has done the same to Mitel.

Now these two iconic brands are crossing the border in opposite directions. Mitel has announced a deal with Tech Data to target the US SMB market. Avaya will be launching its GrowRight channel program which includes a deal registration bonus in Canada. The program pays solutions providers 20% back per quarter on new and strategic product sales including RADvision and IP Office products.

The potential here is obviously bigger for Mitel as the US is a much larger market than Canada. You may remember, some years back, Mitel purchased Inter-Tel in-part to grow its sales in the US SMB market. The problem is the very solid Inter-Tel brand was killed in the process and Mitel didn’t brand themselves much in the US, post-acquisition. The result? Over $723M down the drain.

But Mitel is a new company as they have great virtualization technology and new management. Will SMBs buy from Mitel because they have a virtualization edge? Probably not, because if they aren’t current customers, they may not be familiar enough with Mitel to pull the trigger. The only way the Tech Data deal works for the Canadian company is if they began to brand themselves properly in the US or the Tech Data channel is very strong in telecom and decides to actively push Mitel products. In my experience however, resellers aren’t huge fans of promoting products which get customers responding “You want me to buy from who?”

Avaya for its part may make some progress selling its recently acquired RADvision products in the Great White North. I don’t expect the sales to be huge as the market isn’t so big but Canada seems to be one of the few countries with a stable economy these days which makes it a great location for an organization in search of sales growth.

Mobile Profits are Skyrocketing as 67,000 Are Laid Off

2012-11-15T22:44:09Z

Mobile is not your father’s tech space.

Over the past two years, profits from the top eight mobile vendors has risen from $5.3 billion to $14.4 billion for a whopping increase of $9.1 billion and all this while over 67,000 people have been laid off in the technology. How is this possible you ask? I posited a similar query two months ago regarding Corning’s shares losing value – even while they supply Gorilla Glass to much of the booming mobile market.

FierceWireless sums up some of the companies shedding jobs in the wireless space just this year alone.

Google/Motorola shed 4,000 jobs but these were anticipated. Motorola like others on this list is losing share to Apple and more recently Samsung.
RIM shed 5,000 jobs and is betting the company on Blackberry 10 which is due out in Q2 of 2013.
Alcatel-Lucent has let go of 5,490. Similar to Nortel’s troubles, the company has suffered from a seemingly perpetual slowdown in carrier spending and competition from Asia.
Nokia has shed 10,000 jobs which makes sense as they lost the leadership role in smartphones to Apple and Samsung.
Nokia Siemens Networks has shed 17,000 jobs and faces similar challenges to other carrier equipment providers.

AT&T, Verizon and many other carriers around the world are benefiting tremendously from the massive spending on wireless connectivity from its customers and yet this money is not reaching the majority of equipment providers or device manufacturers. It is worth mentioning Cisco is certainly a beneficiary here and they will now get into the small cell market, making life even more difficult for existing players in the space.

In the past they haven’t been immune to cuts though as they recently laid off 11,300 people.

Sony too announced plans a while back to lay off 13,000 workers. This is the company that invented the mobile audio space, has historically produced some of the lightest and sleekest notebooks on the market and with its SonyEricsson division really led the way in mobile phones for a few years.

The challenge is the wireless market has a lack of competition for now. Apple and Samsung are so dominant the other players have to eke out a living in the shadows. Samsung has done an amazing job using technology and a plethora of devices sizes and shapes to fight this war. Another challenge – the aforementioned organizations are so large they can afford to design and in Samsung’s case, manufacture their own mobile chips. What this means is typical suppliers to a thriving market like Texas Instruments have trouble making a living. This is why TI announced they too are laying off 1,700 wireless employees… A staggering amount for an arms supplier in a wireless arms race.

This is a brave new world for technology – when the PC market was thriving there were hundreds of companies providing computers – some which you put together yourself and others which were bare bones models at discount prices. But now, prohibitive marketing budgets, need for a patent arsenal and carrier relationships have made it difficult for a no-name company to become a market leader overnight.

Google and Amazon are exceptions but they can afford to lose money in mobile for as long as they need to in order to further their core businesses.

Instead, the growth seems to have to come from the aftermarket space – meaning ecosystem plays. Apps makers, hardware add-on companies like Square and case making are the angles to play to generate big money in wireless. For traditional hardware arms suppliers like NSN and TI, mobile is not your father’s tech space.

Microsoft Hopes Free WiFi Will Persuade Developers

2012-10-08T18:59:21Z

Google has been a steady sponsor of free WiFi in airports and subway stations for some years now but Microsoft has decided such sponsorships make sense for them as well. Specifically, the company is paying Boingo for the privilege of supplying free wireless access in parts of San Francisco and Manhattan.

The reason for the generosity has to do with Redmond celebrating Windows 8 and looking forward to introducing the new Windows Store for Windows 8 to the app builder community.

"At Microsoft, we know that amazing apps are being built in New York and San Francisco, and we want to give talented developers the chance to launch their businesses through the Windows Store," said John Richards, Senior Director at Microsoft Corp. "We hope our Boingo Wi-Fi sponsorship will introduce the Windows 8 opportunity to app builders in NYC and San Francisco, while providing folks with Wi-Fi connectivity on-the-go."

For many years, Microsoft has virtually had a lock on the developer community because their platform was the largest and growing the most quickly. In the last few years however Apple and Google have stolen the spotlight and more importantly, the concept of the post-PC era is being touted more and more by companies like Apple, Salesforce and a host of financial and technology analysts.

In short, Microsoft is fighting this battle as an underdog.

Having said that, it is worth noting both Apple and Google have recently surpassed Microsoft in terms of size as measured by market capitalization. Microsoft did recapture the title recently however. As of this writing, here is the standing of each company with Oracle, Amazon, Cisco and HP here for comparison purposes.

Company	Market Cap
Apple	$598.61B
Microsoft	$249.41B
Google	$246.87B
Oracle	$149.39B
Amazon	$116.88B
Cisco	$100.10B
HP	$28.51B

The app ecosystem has always been an important part of a given platform’s success but you could argue with Amazon subsidizing its tablets to some degree because they can count on ancillary revenue from Amazon Prime, that the ecosystem is more important than ever.

This move by Microsoft makes sense but one wonders how many developers will choose development platforms based on the company providing the free WiFi in their neighborhood.

Protecode: Eliminating the Pitfalls of Software Development

2012-08-20T19:07:59Z

Software development productivity has evolved tremendously over the decades as the cost of computing has plummeted rapidly while the cost of human capital has accelerated. Of course there are some anomalies in the “human capital” part of the curve as development can now take place in countries like India where wages are lower than say Silicon Valley. Still, when plotted against a dollar per unit of computing power curve which is exponentially decreasing, it continues to be much more expensive to hire programmers than to add processor cores or to increase clock speed.

Case in point, a few decades back when programming an IBM mainframe, it didn’t matter that programmers had to batch their programs using punch cards and wait for the computer’s results because you weren’t going to add more mainframe processing power unless you won corporate Lotto.

This brings us to the present day where programming has become more of a combination of piecing together existing components and adding your special sauce than it is an endeavor started from scratch. Thanks to the internet and sites like SourceForge and CodePlex, a developer can pick up the pieces of code they need to solve specific problems as they build their finished product.

According to Mahshad Koohgoli, CEO, Protecode, open-source is the ultimate form of code reuse but companies have to know the pedigree of the code they are using. In other words, a working project can have all sorts of issues you aren’t aware of and which may bite you at some point in the future.

It may be tough to remember but there was a time in life where the phrase “There is no such thing as a free lunch” actually was true. Since the nineties, thanks to Napster and now multiple P2P platforms music and movies have become free (well they really aren’t “free” but they sure seem to be to so many). Moreover, you can download thousands of free productivity and game apps which are ad supported or user a freemium-model. In the eighties and nineties you had to pay for your video games whether by buying an Atari-type game console or you plugged quarters endlessly into a large machine every time the red ghost ate your Pacman. What I’m saying – and please sit before reading further, is open-source software is not really free.

Let me explain. You see you can download it for free and use it for free but at some point you may not realize the problem on your hands.

There about half a million projects on SourceForge and two-thirds of them are dead according to Koohgoli and when he uses the term “pedigree” he is referring to maintainability, bugs, security vulnerabilities, support and code evolution. In other words, you don’t want to embed code into your product with known bugs and other problems which may not ever get resolved. Koohgoli says by the way that there are about one-thousand [relevant] projects which get searched on again and again.

So perhaps the above statement needs to be amended for the times to “You have to know where to look to get that free lunch.”

Other challenges facing corporations have to do with compliance. If for example you use software which uses encryption and ship it to a prohibited jurisdiction. The cloud too has its own challenges as according to AFFERO GPL you need to make the source code of your application completely available to users – even on a private cloud.

Koohgoli emphasizes that you need to be aware of these issues to ensure they fit within your business objectives. He further says the goal isn’t to catch intentional plagiarists – developers focus on development and don’t want to be bothered with obligations regarding code use. They also turnover often and don’t often document as much as they should leaving their employers in a difficult situation. Moreover, he reminds us the sooner you catch a deficiency, the cheaper it is to fix.

In order to solve the above challenges, Protecode works with corporations to scan their software against its multi-terabyte database which contains more than 140 million files to find similarities. It can scan binaries, packages, RARs, ZIPs and other compressed packages as well.

From there the company uses its algorithms to determine which files match and moreover which project and version thereof is most likely to the best match. The goal as you can imagine is to minimize the manual work required as he says you could potentially find 10,000 matches for a particular signature in the database.

Another challenge the company helps with is M&A because buyers are becoming painfully aware of the liability involved regarding software and do their best to minimize these sorts of problems before the complete the transaction. You may remember Cisco was sued in 2008 by the Free Software Foundation because of a GPL violation related to the Linksys products they purchased. As a result they had to provide their router software to the open-source community for free.

It turns out an overseas contractor used code they shouldn’t have and as a result the liability found its way into the networking vendor’s product line. This of course reminds us that outsourced software development potentially presents increased challenges to corporate liability.

Protecode came out with a cloud-based solution of their own a few months back and I’m told it has become the solution of choice for the newer companies as well as those developing mobile apps.

Programming has progressed a great deal since the days of IBM and DEC assembler but knowing the quality of the code your company has produced is still as important today as it was when your programmers had to scour a multi-thousand page book to determine what an ABEND code meant. Thankfully the process of determining code quality is much easier today thanks to a slew of new tools like those provided by Protecode.

I hereby retract my comments during CS267 at UCONN where I said who on earth would ever use knowledge of IBM assembler and ABEND codes in the real world?

What the Auto Market can Teach us about Mobile

2012-08-14T21:23:55Z

Have you ever heard from someone that they don’t like Starbucks coffee but they like the experience at the store so they go in, sit down and buy the coffee? It is quite a testament to the world’s largest coffee chain that they are able to lure in customers who don’t like their premium-priced primary product but are instead attracted to their comfortable seating areas and atmosphere replete with cushy couches and free WiFi.

The point here is people buy things for subtle reasons they may not consciously realize. But how you may ask does this translate into tech and cars?

Recently Rob Enderle , President and Principal Analyst, Enderle Group wrote about the patent lawsuit between Apple and Samsung and related the pace of automotive innovation and competition to what is happening in the mobile space.

And he got me thinking about the similarities as well and moreover how the segmentation in one space can potentially be translated into the other.

Brand/Image: For many, Mercedes and BMW are the only cars they will purchase because they are considered top brands but are also priced reasonably enough when compared to a some even higher-end product lines like Bentley or Maserati. Both German manufacturers have done an incredible job in automotive design and performance and to some degree safety. BMW’s “Ultimate Driving Machine” moniker generally tells you the car is more performance oriented while Mercedes is more slanted towards luxury. Audi is similar to Mercedes in its brand positioning.

Of course Apple comes to mind when looking at the top brand in the consumer electronics world. Microsoft has become a strong brand for the older generation – perhaps most like Cadillac. It should be noted this isn’t a great place to be. Nokia may be closest to Chevy or GMC in that its brand was widespread and oftentimes a strong player in the less expensive areas of the market.

Performance is an important part of the automotive market and most car brands have their halo car. Chevy has the Corvette which has helped breathe excitement in the brand and Dodge has the Viper. Nissan has their GT-R and Lexus has their $375,000 LFA made of carbon fiber. BMW has an entire line of performance cars while Mercedes has their AMG brand and Audi has their S and RS cars which boost horsepower and other performance attributes over their less boosted counterparts. For example the A6 generates 211 horsepower while the S6 which looks quite similar on the outside generates 414 hp.

The PC market has followed the automotive space with processor speed and type being akin to engine size, torque and horsepower ratings. For example, a Dell XPS 8500 is promoted on the company’s website as costing $749.99 and for that price you get an Intel Core i5-3450 which is rated at up to 3.5 GHz. For an additional $150 you can upgrade to an i7-3770 processor which has speeds up to 3.9 GHz and is “Dell Recommended” whatever that means.

The tablet space is led by Apple which likes to keep things simple so speed hasn’t been as much of an issue. Over time and iterations of mobile products, Apple has increased its processor speeds and even gone from single to dual-core and quad-core processors but they don’t focus externally on the hardware to a great extent.

The one exception and where the company generates gobs and gobs of money is memory. Apple will charge you a $200 premium for 48 GB of memory while you can buy a SanDisk Cruzer 64 GB USB Flash Drive for $34.99. Then again, it is far simpler to understand memory size than it is to comprehend the difference between an Intel i5-3450 and i7-3770 processor.

Apple has simplified the tablet and smartphone purchase to the point where spec differentiation is tough to pull off beyond memory size and number of cores. This is likely one of the reasons Samsung and others have had to focus on increased phone screen sizes to differentiate themselves from the iPhone.

Safety is an important area for some in the automobile market and most people think Volvo when they think of cars which survive crashes best. Have you noticed however that Volvo hasn’t set the world on fire with its sales? The analogous area in mobility is likely security and guess how many people were concerned about moving from very secure RIM devices to less secure iOS and Android devices? Hint: not too many.

Environmental concern is an area where Toyota has shone this past decade with its Prius. The crossover with tech is the “greenness” of the companies themselves. Recently in fact Apple had to change its stance on the EPEAT environmental standard listing as a result of consumer backlash. It was a rare misstep for the consumer electric brand with a virtual halo around it.

Utility is another reason people purchase their vehicles. How many minivan owners do you know who overlook the chunkiness of their vehicle’s design because of the convenience and/or cost? SUVs are cooler looking and so are crossovers – at least to most eyes but they usually require a lot more cash.

The tech space is similar in that you can spend almost nothing for a clunky, ugly and slow laptop or netbook but a state-of-the-art ultrabook could cost you two times as much or even more! An HP 2000-410US Notebook PC will run you $409.99 while an HP ENVY Spectre XT Ultrabook 13t-2000 will set you back about a grand.

Price/Economy is another area of differentiation for car companies. By economy I am referring to fuel by the way and the point here is the low-end of the market buys their vehicles on a tight fuel/monthly payment budget. They can’t necessarily afford to buy a hybrid car so they settle for a low-cost car which doesn’t weigh so much and which has a smaller engine to conserve on fuel.

The analogous area in tech is the 7” tablet where prices are lower than the iPad. RIM popularized the smaller-sized tablet but their prices were similar to or higher than Apple when they first launched. It took Amazon to come out with the $199 Kindle Fire to shake up the tablet space and attract the lower-end of the market. Apple countered with a $299 iPad 2 which was a brilliant move.

Still, this is the area where many tablet makers will be forced to compete – at least that it unless Apple releases its rumored tablet of similar size.

The mobility space for its part has its own areas of differentiation.

Enterprise sanctioning was perhaps the most important area which has become fairly unimportant. One of the strengths of the Cisco Cius table for example was its centralized app control. The market responded with crickets – not because CIOs didn’t want to exert control over apps downloaded on corporate devices but because users could care less what devices their enterprise sanctions.

Ecosystem is another area which doesn’t exist in the automotive space – at least not in a major way. The idea here is there can be only a handful of big ecosystem players and so far we have Apple, Google/Android and Microsoft as our major players… Even RIM has to run Android apps on its OS to even play in the mobile space.

Another area of differentiation for the mobile and automotive spaces is the automobile market can have many more models because of the wide variety of prices in an auto manufacturer’s complete line up of vehicles. Volkswagen for example sells its cheapest car the Jetta starting at $16,675 while its more expensive cousin the Audi R8 GT Spyder starts at $210,300 and its most expensive corporate cousin the Bugatti Veyron 16.4 Super Sport starts at $2,426,904 or the equivalent of 145.5 Jettas!

But device manufacturers should be cognizant of the parallels between these markets because at the end of the day, consumers are consumers and can be motivated to purchase products for reasons we didn’t foresee ahead of time. Who would have predicted before the iPhone was invented for example, that consumers would prefer a sleek phone made of glass to one which was made out of military grade plastic?

Turns out Cisco Cius Can't Compete With the iPad Either

2012-05-25T18:42:12Z

Company after company is learning what most of instinctively know already – competing with Apple head-on is like trying to tackle a freight train with your bare hands as it is barreling down the tracks in your direction. Amazon with its Kindle Fire competed on price and used its services to subsidize the device. Other tablet makers are finding it virtually impossible to compete without such advantages.

So finding out the news that Cisco is discontinuing its Cius tablet isn’t a surprise. I have mentioned before that Cisco is not good at consumer products and although the Cius was targeted at the enterprise, we know IT has become “consumerized” meaning the CIO doesn’t drive tablet decisions. As a result, Cisco has to compete with Apple head-on which as described above is virtually impossible to do.

Cisco’s OJ Winge had this to say about the company’s tablet and software strategy going forward:

Over the last year, Cisco has demonstrated a commitment to delivering innovative software like Cisco Jabber and Cisco WebEx across a wide spectrum of operating systems, tablets and Smart Phones. We’re seeing tremendous interest in these software offerings. Customers see the value in how these offerings enable employees to work on their terms in the Post-PC era, while still having access to collaboration experiences.

Based on these market transitions, Cisco will no longer invest in the Cisco Cius tablet form factor, and no further enhancements will be made to the current Cius endpoint beyond what’s available today. However, as we evaluate the market further, we will continue to offer Cius in a limited fashion to customers with specific needs or use cases.

Moving forward, we intend to double down on software offerings, like Jabber and WebEx, that provide the anytime, anywhere, and any device experiences. We will leverage key learnings and key collaboration experiences native to Cius in our other collaboration products.

Experience matters, and Cisco is focused on empowering individual collaboration styles more effectively and securely, while providing the broadest choice of collaboration options based on preference, location, and device.

To give you a sense of just how fast the market moves it was 11 months ago where the press was invited to a Cius launch event. After the meeting I posted the video above and an entry titled Cisco Cius and the Need for an Enterprise Tablet. One of my concerns from the post was the following:

The challenges here are how many people want a seven-inch tablet when they can get a ten-inch tablet at a similar price? It is worth noting in my tests with the Cius and the Blackberry Playbook that you get used to the smaller form-factor and obviously there are some portability benefits to a smaller device.

Is Cius a winner? Yes – absolutely but that doesn’t mean it will be successful. Hear me out. The Cius and the Avaya A175 with the Flare interface are building a category called enterprise tablet and to date it isn’t clear if this is a real category or not. By real I mean – substantial in terms of the number of devices sold. In other words, other than some vertical markets like hospitals where IT generally directs such device rollouts, most other industries have seen the BYOD-effect of the consumerization of IT meaning IT doesn’t dictate as much as they used to. Moreover, many workers are purchasing their own tablets and bringing them to work – reducing corporate expense while keeping workers happier.

One final issue is the tablet market right now is pretty much all iPad and Android devices haven’t made much of a dent. Analysts believe this will change but some people of note believe it is possible for Apple to own the tablet space. Moreover, with the close synergy between iTunes and iCloud, Apple makes it that much more desirable to have your tablet come from the same company.

On the way to the event I wrote a post How Cisco Needs to Sell the Cius Tablet which also outlined the risks:

The downside risk is fairly obvious though and that is that software is cheaper than hardware and most anything the Cius can do, an iPad or other Android tablet can as well.

And then there is the consumer electronics angle - Cisco purchased Flip and shut it down a few years later because the company isn't very good at competing in the consumer space where margins are razor-thin. Obviously the growth of smartphones helped kill the pocket-sized video camcorder market as well.

So for Cisco the obvious sales angle is to sell the Cius as an IP-phone which can do so much more. Avaya will obviously be doing the same with its A175 tablet. The challenge in the long-term will be convincing users that they want an Android tablet instead of an iPad. Which means both Avaya and Cisco need to be much better at doing consumer electronics - potentially partnering with a tablet maker like Samsung or HTC to one-up Apple.

I stand by my suggestion that the company should have partnered with a consumer electronics company. Now that Google Owns Motorola Mobility they could be a likely partner as well.

My sense is however that Cisco is so upset about its consumer electronics losses between Flip, Umi and Cius that they won't be open to any such partnerships unless they have little or no risk associated with them.

I reached out to Avaya regarding their strategy and spoke with Joel Hackney, President of Sales and Field Operations. He told me they remain committed on extending video to all employees in the enterprise including mobile video and SIP leadership are very important areas for them. Their pending RADVISION acquisition gives them a full video offering allowing you to enhance your own device or purchase a complete solution.

The question now is will any other company be able to compete with Apple as a pure-play tablet maker. Google should be coming out with their solution soon and we will see what sort of acceptance there is in the market.

Microsoft Working on Skype Everywhere Initiative

2012-04-20T12:37:01Z

The fact that Microsoft would want to integrate Skype everywhere shouldn't be too surprising, Office/Lync and Windows Phone are obvious areas and so is Xbox. That's why news of the company looking for engineers who can delve into the hybrid world of video games and IP communications shouldn't be too surprising.

When Microsoft integrates Skype into Xbox and bundles some free calling into the solution, what's to stop them from offering a DECT phone as well? With retail prices of DECT 6.0 phones starting at less than $20, the idea makes more and more sense.

Sure, you can use a cordless/wireless phone with Skype today but if Microsoft integrates it all seamlessly and video is added for free, what happens to the business models of Ooma, netTALK and magicJack?

And what about the cable companies, AT&T and Verizon? Sure, a Skype home phone calling solution will be inferior as it doesn't allow emergency calling due to a lack of E-911 support but still, if it is part of a bundle and has HD voice support, why pay for phone company or cable calling? Especially if it has video as well and other great Skype calling features, presence, etc.

Additionally, a benefit of the Skype purchase will be potentially becoming the phone provider for hundreds of millions of consumers. Of course Skype already has hundreds of millions of users but when I say "phone" I mean the actual physical phone, not the computer to computer experience.

Moreover, if Microsoft is successful, it will be achieving what Cisco couldn't with Umi. And remember, one of the reasons I said Umi wouldn't make it was because of Xbox Kinect. I also mentioned Skype's deal with Panasonic, Sony and others as another reason. It would be ironic if Skype and Xbox together were to fulfill the market niche Umi was looking to exploit.

The challenge for Microsoft is the tablet market - which today means iPad, is eating the video game space. So the next version of Xbox better have some really compelling features to draw the gamers back. I would think they believe tight Skype integration will be one of these features.

Monetizing the Mobile Data Explosion with Tektronix Communications

2012-03-20T19:26:10Z

Remember when you were in the engineering lab and you relied on a Tektronix oscilloscope to analyze signals? I do and I deeply craved one of my own but could never afford one. But the company once part of Tektronix, Tektronix Communications does its best to ensure that not being able to afford their products is not a reason to keep you from buying. The company provides solutions for carriers which help with pre-deployment, network operations, customer care, network and RF engineering solutions as well as business performance. You see they want to ensure the solutions you buy, pay for themselves so carriers are more likely to purchase their products than a college kid eyeing a high-quality scope.

In a recent meeting with Laurence Alexander and Samir Marwaha they shared with me the news that the company has been awarded more than 50% of the LTE monitoring opportunities worldwide partnering with more than 15 tier one carriers around the globe. The company helps its customers across multiple “technology domains” such as EUTRAN, EPC, IMS and VoLTE.

Moreover the company is assisting carriers maximize revenue per subscriber as well as ensuring commercial readiness of LTE networks. They also assist with OTT partnerships between carriers and companies who can utilize such QoS enhanced pipes like perhaps in the video space. According to Laurence this is a win/win because carriers can charge for it and consumers get a better quality service.

Moreover deep packet classification enables service providers to get a better sense of what users are doing on the network. Moreover the company’s solutions allow operators to determine network quality from a user perspective – and at this point they can even alert customer care that a problem is taking place. Quality issues are just one cause of churn but certainly a very large portion of the churn pie. This sort of solution is designed to help carriers be proactive and retain customers – even ones which just had a negative experience.

Certainly one of the reasons carriers to choose Tektronics Communications has to do with the breadth of product line starting with a product like K2Air/NSA for advanced RAN and RF performance analysis to OptiMon for deep drive RAN troubleshooting. Then there is the Iris series – traffic analyzers, session analyzers and performance intelligence solutions – all the way up to touchpoint CEM for customer experience management.

And as the growth of LTE and VoLTE accelerates so should the opportunities for the company to assist carriers in providing better quality of service to customers. In addition, the company aims to help them find new ways to generate revenue by providing differentiated, higher quality services.

Disclosure: I am a shareholder in Tektronix Communications parent Danaher. Pictured is the graphic of Danaher's holdings in the tech, telecom and related spaces.

Check out a Webinar on Telecom Visibility 2.0

2012-03-20T17:41:14Z

For over 20 years I’ve been tracking Unimax a company that has been the only pure-play moves/adds/changes solutions provider to large enterprises around the globe. Andrew Hunkins was the founder/CTO/CEO throughout the years and my most memorable meetings with him were at the Harry Newton/CMP Computer Telephony EXPOs also known as CTEXPO in Los Angeles, California. A huge accomplishment for the company Hunkins founded was lasting – it’s been around since 1985!! This is a big deal.

It is worth mentioning that Hunkins has moved on from the company but he/Unimax made national news when after the Iraq war they were featured in BusinessWeek because they lost a partnership deal in France because there was a brief spat between the US and the French over the Iraq war.

You remember, when we were briefly calling French Fries, Freedom Fries and body odor French perfume – admittedly I might have been the only one speaking the latter – but I know you were thinking it.

Unimax has evolved over the years and Minnesota-based company is sponsoring a webinar on TMCnet which will discuss how organizations can increase their telecom visibility and reporting. I would have called the webinar using big data and analytics to manage your disparate PBX and communications systems across the campus and/or globe but admittedly that is a really long headline.

But you get the idea. The webinar takes place in a couple of days and thanks for working with me during this brief commercial message from our sponsor.