First Coffee for August 23, 2005

David Sims : First Coffee
David Sims
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First Coffee for August 23, 2005

By David Sims
[email protected]

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Billie Holiday’s Lady In Autumn: The Best of The Verve Years, a 1991 compilation of her late recordings:

Got one of the more interesting comments in a while yesterday on something in the column. Yes, First CoffeeSM does get some great responses, and we also get… well, some of you people have way too much free time on your hands.

A senior executive from a 9-1-1 service provider who asked to remain anonymous wrote in response to First CoffeeSM’s meditation (i.e. slightly unhinged rant) on Nuvio’s lawsuit challenging the wisdom of the Federal Communications Commission giving VoIPers 120 days to conform to the outmoded emergency 9-1-1 technology they’re in the process of rendering obsolete to say that actually, Karl Rove had nothing to do with it, Joe Wilson’s the one who outed his wife, Valerie Plame as a CIA agent when the lying buffoon shot off his mouth to The Nation and The New York Times… uh, sorry, wrong anonymous source…

“Read your piece about the Nuvio lawsuit,” the exec writes. Of course we all agree that Nuvio is just trying to buy time. Actually, I think no one will completely make the deadline, because the ILECs can’t really get the connection orders processed in time; their systems just aren’t set up for that.”

First CoffeeSM can’t help but think that the FCC knew this, too, when they set up the deadline.

“Someone told me that there is a team of literally dozens of people working in one ILEC trying to deal with the orders placed by Vonage. This includes people working to change processes to allow VoIP carriers to order connections and services, and the people actually processing the orders.”

The 120 deadline “IS too short,” the exec writes, “and is causing a very unfortunate thing to happen. The industry actually worked out a standard that met the needs of the 9-1-1 community and the VoIP community. It was done in NENA, the National Emergency Number Association, and it’s called ‘i2’.”

The problem, as she explains it, is that i2 depends on creating some databases derived from, but somewhat different from the existing 9-1-1 databases, and there is not enough time to create them in the 120 days: “Since the order doesn’t say you have to follow the standard, and because the databases aren’t available, the VoIP guys and their contractors are putting together solutions that won’t meet the needs of the 9-1-1 guys, but fits within the letter of the Order.”

As a wise man said once, the letter of the law killeth.

“The result will be unfortunate; the Public Safety Answering Points will still be whining, the VoIP carriers will claim they are in compliance, and we’ll be struggling longer than we should be to get the right thing to happen.”

The long term will see the 9-1-1 system evolving to be IP based, of that this executive is confident, “and in fact VoIP based. There is work underway in NENA, called “i3”, to do this. There is a report out of the FCC’s NRIC organization that describes how this will work, and there is effort in the IETF to support this vision already.”

He’s confident that the VoIP carriers will like i3, because “it’s probably going to be a lot cheaper for them, but it takes upgrading PSAPs, for which there is currently no money, and lots of bureaucracy to get through.”

Public Safety Answering Points are the local governmental organizations who pick up the phone and respond to the 9-1-1 calls, the cops and fire departments and paramedics and the exec is correct, few have “Upgrade To Cutting-Edge Technology” as a budgetary line item.

Bear in mind that this is someone in the industry, so take all product and technology references as maybe possibly coming from somebody with a not purely disinterested stake in the technologies and products heretowith named heretofore therewith et cetera ad infinitum, but the point stands: An artificially-set deadline does not help the best technologies develop, but tries instead to cram fresh innovation into the wagon ruts of the past.

A tip of the coffee pot to Blair Goulet, named president of Open Solutions Canada, a strategic business unit of Open Solutions Inc.

As president of Open Solutions Canada, Goulet will be responsible for leading the Banking Solutions Group and Payment Solutions Group. Open Solutions Canada operates under the auspices of Open Solutions’ International Operations Department and Goulet will report to Wayne Ginn, Open Solutions’ vice president of International Operations.

Goulet joins Open Solutions Canada from SOLCORP, the financial services software division of EDS.

Software maker Autonomy Corporation plc, is announcing an Original Equipment Manufacturer agreement with BEA Systems, allowing BEA to embed Autonomy’s IDOL 5.0, described by company officials as “infrastructure technology which enables enterprises to perform advanced operations on unstructured, semi structured and structured information in real-time,” into BEA WebLogic Portal 9.0.

IDOL 5.0 is the latest version of Autonomy’s flagship product IDOL, with some new features such as a sentient architecture, a new algorithm for Automatic Query Guidance, 50 new IDOL operations and improved installation facilities.

Autonomy and BEA have worked together in various partnership deals since 2001.

Saying “the future of enterprise portals lies far beyond simple search facilities,” Nils Gilman, Senior Director, Product Marketing, BEA Systems said the Autonomy technology “is designed to add significant value to BEA portal solutions through the full automation, clustering and personalization of unstructured information in the enterprise.”

Stouffer Egan, CEO of Autonomy’s North American operations claimed the company’s OEM business is growing at 70 percent year on year.

Enterprise Marketing Management vendor Aprimo, Inc. is announcing that the, ah, delicately-named European printer Communisis has selected Aprimo as a partner to provide software and support its managed technology service offering.

Communisis will offer Aprimo Marketing, a suite of Web-based EMM software products designed “to bring more precision, discipline and control to the marketing process,” according to company officials, as well as a copy of Das Kapital.

Aprimo Marketing products will be made available to Communisis clients for the Web-native platform that can be integrated with a customer’s existing enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management systems.

According to Cox News Service, 42 percent of respondents in a recent survey said that coffee is “more or equally important” than sex in any given week:

“The survey, commissioned by Dunkin’ Donuts, also found that coffee drinkers reported more robust romance, with two-thirds of respondents saying they had sex once a week or more.” Only 58 percent of non-coffee drinkers reported as much action. So either coffee drinkers are more prone to exaggeration…

First CoffeeSM would not say that coffee is “more important” than sex. But coffee and Dunkin’s doughnuts? Hmm. At any rate, First CoffeeSM is concerned for Richard Walker, who wrote recently in the Waikato Times about giving up coffee.

In light of the above survey results Mr. Walker might want to reconsider his rash effort.

If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First CoffeeSM accepts no sponsored content.



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