Ian Colville is product manager at Aculab with responsibility for the company’s SS7 and GroomerII solutions. His key role includes support for the company’s global sales force.
Colville addressed the audience on Day 2 of the Communications Developer Conference, with a presentation entitled, Communication Breakdown, the key theme of which was the breakdown of the old order of the communications industry.
Accordingly, Colville kicked off his presentation with a clip of the classic Led Zeppelin song of the same title, and promised that he would pepper his presentation with Led Zeppelin references throughout.
Addressing the assertion that the network of tomorrow will be a stupid network, Colville had his own take. He agrees that lower-level infrastructure is indeed better off dumb, but he maintained that there still needs to be some intelligence in the network.
To support that, Colville spoke about the growing trend where services are increasingly being provided from within the cloud, including desktop business/productivity apps. He referenced the success of Salesforce.com and other software-as-a-service vendors, as well as alternatives to Microsoft Office, such as Google, who recently announced the availability of business productivity applications available from the cloud.
The key attribute of course, is the ability for users to be able to access their services from wherever they are, from any computer.
Colville gave several examples of applications that are being accessed in this manner, including:
- Conferencing – an increasingly network based offering;
- Information services – have always been a network-based offering, currently being enhanced with the latest speech solutions such as text to Speech and Automatic Speech recognition.
- Contact centers – increasingly deploying distributed, remote workforces utilizing hosted technologies.
- Virtual Office – service offering lots of features, delivered over SIP trunking, accessible from anywhere in the world.
Indeed Colville provided a long list of benefits of network based, intelligent applications that are increasing productivity across a variety of markets and industries.
Addressing the developers directly, Colville said that there are many new ways of developing applications, and there are myriad new opportunities, however, there is still money to be made transitioning old services to new architectures.
The real existing opportunity is the potential to deliver more cost effective and increasingly feature rich services.
“All developers,” said Colville, “will have the opportunity to deliver services to users at one point in the network from service delivery platforms from another point in the network.”
So it appears the network might not necessarily be as stupid as once previously thought.
Now a quick return to the Led Zeppelin references. I’m sure Ian will correct me if I missed any, but my colleague and I were paying close attention for mentions of rock classics and this is the list we came up with:
- Communications Breakdown
- In Through The Out Door
- Houses Of The Holy
- Fool In The Rain
- Over The Hills And Far Away
- Good Times Bad Times
- Ten Years Gone
- Gallows Pole
- Dazed And Confused
- Presence
- Trampled Under Foot
- That’s The Way
- Rock And Roll
- Celebration Day
- How Many More Times
- Bring it on Home
- The Song Remains the Same
- Ramble On
I would just like to say that I’m pretty sure I heard #19, when Ian, as he was leaving the stage, simply said, “Thank You.”
UPDATE:
I caught up with Ian Colville this evening, who told me that my attempt at catching all his Led Zeppelin references was a valiant effort, I managed to fall short.
Here are the references I missed:
In the Evening
Nobody’s Fault but Mine
Heartbreaker
I also missed the secondary references of:
Presence
Thank You
Communications Breakdown
And the lyrical references:
“We’ve done four already…” (intro to The Ocean)
“And if you listen very hard…” (from Stairway to Heaven)
“There are two paths you can go by…” (from Stairway to Heaven)
I also want to thank Joe Fabiano for helping me out with the Led Zep references.
Without him, I would have found myself on a Black Mountain Side, alone, Down By The Seaside, (or The Ocean, as it were) walking around like a Fool in the Rain, with nothing but Four Sticks and a Tangerine, feeling as if I was literally In My Time Of Dying.
But Hey, Hey... What Can I Do?
