IP Convergence: Beyond VoIP, Beyond Cost Savings

My day started with a 7am flight, followed by a soon to be customer visit,  I then presented a
IPv6 state-of-the-union  perspective at a Futurenet panel discussion along with John Curran Chairman of ARRIN,  and Todd Underwood of NANOG. And ended the day with the Massnetcomms 2008 award dinner.

The highlight of my day was at the award dinner, I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Vanu Bose (he is the son of the founder of Bose) who was honored with the most innovative product of the year.  Vanu has developed a software controlled radio that can operate across many deployed mobile standards .  Instead of fork lifting hardware,  you change the software and mobile operators can efficiently rollout new wireless protocols.  Kinda like adding a new application on your PC.

While visiting with several individuals a few weeks ago at the Ziff Davis Unified Communications Summit in Seattle, WA I noticed that some people hadn't yet realized the power of one aspect to the overall value of unified communications which relates to presence awareness. That is leveraging presence not just in instant messaging but in other communication vehicles can play an important role in transforming your business impact as an IT organization. As a result I thought I would dedicate this post to help create ideas around things that can be done to assist in helping IT in leading the way.

Here at Global Crossing in an attempt to leverage this core components of Unified Communications in an ongoing effort to incorporate the advantages of collaborative, converged services within our enterprise we've transformed internal applications from static non presence aware to anticipatory engaged communication tools that are supporting contextual collaboration with presence-awareness throughout the enterprise. In this instance presence-awareness (whether someone is available in simple terms and how to contact) is utilizing capabilities including chat, computer-based telephony, conferencing, IP video, and e-mail across tools that leveraged across the enterprise drive in principle more efficacy from consumption and corresponding execution. In fact it is my opinion that since presence has been embedded into our application infrastructure to enhance our collaborative capabilities it is natural to see transformational improvements occur around our "quality of experience" associated to the overall user experience. This is so because enabling enhanced customer experience truly enables the IT organization to drive one more component to our IT organizations transformational success in enabling the business to not only "react" but be proactive by achieving extensibility required within the distribution transparency model required for execution. Said another way the fact that presence awareness has been integrated into our application infrastructure means this action will further enhance our agility to enhance operational efficiency by allowing application "pivots" to be present thus accelerating communication by eliminating in some instances serial cognitive task execution.

As the industry landscape continues to evolve there are a few constants that will remain the same: (1) increasing business demands require more innovative, transformational capabilities between employees, partners and customers and (2) continually driving operational velocity reductions around the cost basis of delivering information technology services is imperative. It is commonly believed by many vendors such as Avaya, Cisco, Intel, Nortel and Siemens as well as software developers such as IBM and Microsoft that presence technology will continue to become an increasingly important tool at driving traditional costs out by attacking the serial nature of traditional work execution thus increasing operational efficiency.

So why is presence so important to Unified Communication services? Presence is important because it can become the intelligent communication application for converged IP communication services such as those demonstrated by our IT organization at Global Crossing. Determining where a user is and how best to reach them in our case by leveraging presence enabled applications that have been integrated into our infrastructure with the "glue" to increase the overall value of our converged IP services brought to the table and help realize substantial business transformation value.Said another way presence-aware applications offered on a converged IP communication service help evolve traditional serial actions of quickly determining and thus engaging with employees regardless of location, modality or scheduling which allows our globally dispersed users to communicate and collaborate in real time providing productivity in a truly global and mobile workforce environment. Combined converged IP communication services with presence technology provide for accelerated collaboration between our employees, partners and customers by knocking down the walls of traditional serial communications and by accelerating communication through anticipatory engagement.

Presence is the value.

Time and time again I meet with technology leaders who ask a similar question - that is "How do we continue to cut costs while increasing productivity?" I know it sounds somewhat like an age old question that has been solved several times but I think its important to look deeper at the answers since they are as important as ever. Revisiting prior days as an IT leader whether at Global Crossing or my prior days at Kodak in their IT organization it can be stated that we were faced with many of the same challenges faced by most enterprise IT organizations leading to the above questions. That is "How can we continue to cut costs while increasing productivity....." or variants of that such as "driving operational efficiency while lowering the velocity of spend all the while increasing functionality by offering new and innovative services."

Such questions are based essentially on a few key areas:

1) Cost reduction - there is a need to continuously evaluate how services are delivered, while reducing costs without impacting performance, function and availability. Eliminate unnecessary costs ..... always!

2) Infrastructure Simplification  - always evaluate how IT operations are delivered to find faster and more effective delivery mechanisms, while reducing administration and, thus, overhead.

3) Increase productivity by leveraging investments in key areas such as convergence technology - converged communications over a secure, reliable network in order to meet the demands of the business needs can and will provide increased value while maintaining or reducing costs. The key here is to make strategic investments that further extend and continuously enable services at or reduced costs.

4) Continuous Innovation - Chose to focus on innovation in customer experience where improved application performance and real-time interactive applications to improve users quality of experience can be realized. That is - make investments that will pay back dividends by focusing on customers and overall care management.

With these similar challenges Global Crossing's IT organization needed to drive change by delivering on infrastructure services that were not only forward-looking, but also eased our business transformation in a way that helped us meet the demands of the business, as well as prepared us for what was coming next. Fast forward now a few years and when technology leaders ponder solutions to those questions I like to point them down the direction of solving the problems by embracing technology that will not only help them change their business delivery model but also keep them  aligned to some core tenants and objectives:

� Information technology and business leaders should align IT strategic plans with corporate and business vision/goals. Don't just have a plan, be sure to align with the corporations goals.
� Provide IT architecture foundations and fundamentals that will facilitate corporate transformation or be the catalyst for it. IT shouldn't be viewed as a cost center rather as something that can be transformational. That said its important that IT leaders lead and be able to see around corners to adapt and be ready for the business needs not just wait for the business to come to them.
� Maximize IT operational efficiencies by investing in key targeted technology areas enabling the future of services. You should be continually assessing whether or not technology investments (old or new) are adding value and returning on investments. If they are not then its time to pull the plug ... but be sure to only do so after you have secured support from business functional leaders otherwise your plan might not make it past the proposal.

In closing don't be afraid to answer the question on how to save money and still provide value. As noted above IT organizations should transform themselves so that they are truly leading not just following.

In response to the article How Feds are dropping the ball on IPv6 over at Network World, Rich Fisk writes:

Quoted from http://blogs.globalcrossing.com/ipv6-eternal-wait-pt2#comment-928
I just attended the Network World Live Road show here in DC and the chairman of ARIN seemed to have an opposing view to the [statement] that you made in NW.

1. Somewhere in 2010 the IP address space will run out as emerging markets grow.

2. His organization is telling ISP to make plans for IPv6 as there will be a day soon where ARIN will not be handing out more IPv4 space.

3. After #2 happens (no pun intended) there will be the beginnings of two Internets. One IPv4 and one IPv6. While all sites will be reachable with IPv4 clients at first there will come a time where there will be IPv6 only sites.

Yes, we know that IPv4 address will run very low some day, but the sky has been falling for 12, maybe 13 years now.  People are tired of hearing it, in large part because you can still get IPv4 address space today.  Even if an organization starts to run low on addresses they can resort to NAT and RFC1918 (private address space, e.g. 10.x.x.x).  

The way I see it, getting denied for a new IPv4 address and being given an IPv6 address block may be the only catalyst for IPv6 deployment in the LAN.  Early IPv6 deployments in the LAN that are forced due to unavailability of IPv4 addresses only will employ a NAT with external IPv4 addresses (or address), but they will function more or less identically as the use of RFC1918 space would.  IT Network Managers will have decide if they go with an IPv6 implementation over the more familiar private address space.  They will have to use a NAT, because they are going to get stuck in this situation long before the Internetv6 is here.

As of today, finding popular sites that have deployed v6 to their web sites is extremely rare.  I did a little experiment with top of mind web sites.  As one would hope, ipv6.org resovles to an IPv6 address.  From there, I had a little more trouble.  By the way,"traceroute6: Non-recoverable failure in name resolution" means that no AAAA record was found, or in laymans terms, the site is NOT IPv6 ready.  The results are below.

dsiegel@terra:~ >traceroute6 www.ipv6.org
traceroute6 to shake.stacken.kth.se (2001:6b0:1:ea:202:a5ff:fecd:13a6) from 2001:450:1:1001::1e, 64 hops max, 12 byte packets
 1  2001:450:1:1001::1d  39.711 ms  39.317 ms  40.010 ms
 2  sl-bb1v6-rly-t-96.sprintv6.net  113.674 ms  113.480 ms  113.673 ms
 3  sl-bb1v6-nyc-t-1000.sprintv6.net  126.309 ms  126.216 ms  126.633 ms
 4  sl-bb1v6-sto-t-102.sprintv6.net  218.384 ms  215.206 ms  214.051 ms
 5  2001:7f8:d:fb::24  342.243 ms  342.473 ms  342.180 ms
 6  se-tug.nordu.net  343.023 ms  341.761 ms  341.059 ms
 7  c2sth-so-6-0-0.sunet.se  342.812 ms  343.377 ms  344.655 ms
 8  2001:6b0:dead:beef:2::2c6  342.023 ms  342.605 ms  341.990 ms
 9  2001:6b0:1:1200::1  342.148 ms  342.206 ms  343.006 ms
10  clubroom-gw.stacken.kth.se  342.221 ms  342.900 ms  342.158 ms
11  igloo.stacken.kth.se  342.637 ms  344.114 ms  343.147 ms

dsiegel@terra:~ >traceroute6 www.google.com
traceroute6: Non-recoverable failure in name resolution

dsiegel@terra:~ >traceroute6 www.yahoo.com
traceroute6: Non-recoverable failure in name resolution

dsiegel@terra:~ >traceroute6 www.ask.com
traceroute6: hostname nor servname provided, or not known

dsiegel@terra:~ >traceroute6 www.msn.com
traceroute6: Non-recoverable failure in name resolution

dsiegel@terra:~ >traceroute6 www.globalcrossing.com
traceroute6: hostname nor servname provided, or not known

dsiegel@terra:~ >traceroute6 www.verio.net
traceroute6: hostname nor servname provided, or not known

dsiegel@terra:~ >traceroute6 www.sprint.net
traceroute6: hostname nor servname provided, or not known

dsiegel@terra:~ >traceroute6 www.att.net
traceroute6: hostname nor servname provided, or not known

dsiegel@terra:~ >traceroute6 www.sprintv6.net
traceroute6 to www.sprintv6.net (2001:440:1239:4::2) from 2001:450:1:1001::1e, 64 hops max, 12 byte packets
1 2001:450:1:1001::1d 40.637 ms 41.133 ms 41.545 ms
2 sl-bb1v6-rly-t-96.sprintv6.net 113.473 ms 113.064 ms 112.476 ms
3 sl-bb1v6-nyc-t-1000.sprintv6.net 125.839 ms 125.544 ms 126.679 ms
4 sl-s1v6-nyc-t-1004.sprintv6.net 127.108 ms 132.845 ms 128.818 ms
5 www.sprintv6.net 127.799 ms 127.502 ms 127.634 ms



Good going Sprint!  You win a prize! Granted, it's not their main corporate web site and it does little more than check if you are v6 enabled and give you some helpful v6 related links, so it's not a true datapoint for an ordinary site.

In reality, I think that there will be a gap between #2 and #3, or when we run out of IPv4 addresses to assign and when all web sites and other servers have both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses.  Enterprises will deploy NAT to maintain connectivity to the Internetv4 rather than contact every web site admin to request they enable for IPv6, and the Federal networks will satisfy the mandate by being able to run IPv6 rather than take the giant step of actually turning off IPv4.  That, my friends, is the path of least resistance.

A number of bloggers have been blogging about on Google's mobile plans for the better part of the year.

Recently I blogged  as to how Google may be able to take their may ad revenue  business model into the mobile space.

Well today, Google made it very clear with their mobile alliance announcements .

The interesting part of the discussion revolves around Verizon. Specifically, Verizon may be in talks with google in joining Sprint and T-Mobile as part of Google's plans.

But is this the same Verizon that sued the FCC after the FCC adopted Google's open access  motions?

Yes it is the same Verizon.

It may be that Verizon needs to be involved and not get blindsided as they did when they choose not to support Apple's iPhone, and lost a tremendous branding opportunity.

Or, it may be that Verizon needs to be involved to make sure it's part of the disruption as mobile business models change.

Another score for the open source business model and for the public as we should see innovation at as faster velocity.

Time will tell!

ICANN released an informative announcement  on IPv6 last week.

The paper is well written for both technical and non-technical audiences.  I did post a response at ICANN’s blog site  providing some insight as to how Global Crossing is working to address them.

Global Crossing provides IPv6 support today:

• As the first—and only—provider to support IPv6 natively on a global scale, Global Crossing is uniquely qualified to enable a transition to IPv6
• Dual-stack edge routers enables v4/v6 on the same port at no additional cost
• IPv6 addresses provided
• IPv6 DNS delegation
• IPv6 caching servers

 Global Crossing is one  of only nine Tier 1 ISPs worldwide*: (* As of October  29^th , 2007 )

• AOL Transit Data Network
• AT&T
• Global Crossing
• Level 3
• Verizon Business
• NTT Communications
• Qwest
• SAVVIS
• Sprint Nextel Corporation

 Global Crossing owns and operates our their  global IP network:

• One seamless global IP network (AS#3549) with end-to-end control covering 100,000+ Miles/160,000+ Kilometers

The ICANN fact sheet  identifies a couple of additional issues and concerns:

What are the issues with IPv6 rollout?

IPv6 is already available in some desktop and server operating systems. However, the vast majority of Internet content and services are only provided over IPv4, which is a problem as IPv4 and IPv6 are not interoperable. That means a desktop computer that only has an IPv6 address cannot access a website that only has IPv4 connectivity without passing through a NAT-PT device or some other form of protocol translation system or application gateway.

Another key issue in IPv6 deployment is that the vast majority of networks were built for IPv4. Enabling IPv6 on those networks involves making sure that provisioning, management, monitoring, auditing, billing and firewalls all work with IPv6.

Both of the issues will affect IPv6 adoption unless the IP Carrier can offer a platform that mitigates the risks and costs of adoption.  Global Crossing’ Dual Stack offer provides the needed mitigation of both adoption issues.

 

Is it IPv6 or nothing?

The answer is No,  customer's can  utilize a Carrier that can provide IPv6 IPv4 dual stack Globally!

Check it out!

This weekend I read a commentary by PC Magazine’s  editor and Chief Lance Ulanoff “Don’t Give Google 700Mhz”

I posted  a response at their website and I am still bothered by the position he has taken.

“ The position that 700Mhz digital data services may require antennas as broadcast analog TV is totally off base.  An analog broadcast !=  (not equal to) digital data, broadcast TV is just that a broadcast signal without any protocol between the receiver and transmitter, whereas digital data receiver and transmitter have defined protocols that optimize reception given the available data rate e.g. WiFi, GPRS etc …

Some  of the biggest advantages of wireless digital data at 700Mhz is not needing line of site ,  not prone to moisture (water in leaves) and a huge chunk of to be available spectrum.

The position that Verizon, Sprint and ATT know the business and can do better for the American public is weak at best.

“The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is an independent United States government agency, directly responsible to Congress. The FCC was established by the Communications Act of 1934 and is charged with regulating interstate and international communications by radio, television, wire, satellite and cable. The FCC's jurisdiction covers the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and U.S. possessions.”

The FCC’s job is to manage American spectrum for the country , e.g. the people.

When was the last time Verizon, Sprint and ATT acted on behalf of the people?  Checkout your Verizon RZAR and you’ll find out they feature lock Motorola’s features (like local access to Bluetooth to transfer files), whereas T-mobile does not.

Google is acting to further itself , but there’s a difference here.  Google’s advocacy on Open Access to Spectrum is disruptive   and will create innovation in the wireless industry that will benefit the people.

Google’s greatest strength is their  success, their greatest challenge is maturing as a regulatory influencer against the incumbents who have decades of experience on playing the game.”

I had to rewrite the post several times just to get my emotions out.

Google has and will change the wireless industry.  The position they have taken on open access on spectrum will create innovate  environment , which will open the markets to more companies that develop hardware, software or services (content).

The big three will need to be competitive to protect their base, this is no different than the FCC open market position in the 90’s that opened local markets which benefited users with more choices and lowered costs.

Here's the second part of our Virtualization series  and a continuation of Virtualization -  Part 1 – The Abstraction of the Internet.

A computer consists of several key elements that along with software (and firmware) provide useful applications like the browser you are using to read this blog from our web servers.

Here are some of the items that are noteworthy:

Central Processing Unit (CPU) – aka Pentium for you wintel folks, is the heart of the computer and executes instructions (software or firmware) that are programmed by a software engineer.

Input/Output Devices – Provides a method to enter , display or share information from the computer, for example:  Display, keyboard, mouse.

Random Access Memory (RAM) – Is memory that is accessed by the CPU which losses its contents when you remove power.  RAM (Typically) is the fastest memory that a CPU and “read” or “write”.

Disk Drive – Is memory that is also accessed by the CPU which doesn’t lose its contents when you remove power.  Disks are slower than RAM.

Flash Memory – Is like RAM but has the characteristics of a disk drive.

Data Bus – Depending on the CPU (8 bit, 16 bit, 32 bit or 64 bits wide) is where the CPU can read or write data from or to the various memory devices,  Input/Output devices.  Each bit is a “1” or “0”.

Address Bus – Also dependent on the CPU , this is where the CPU (using bits) selects the location in memory to read or write data.

Firmware – aka BIOS for wintel folks, is software that is used to “boot” (restart from a known state)  the computer that resides in Flash memory or a Programmable Read Only  Memory (PROM).

Software – eg Office.

Operating System – eg Windows, is a layer of software that abstracts the hardware and controls the overall operation of the computer.

Networks – Are communication systems that allow computers to share information.

Programming Languages – A CPU can only understand binary (“1” or “0” s) for the  instructions it executes.  There are various instructions to read , write, add, multiply, subtract , divide and move data. However, Humans need to abstract the instructions into words to make it easier.  These languages define the way words are used forming a grammer (just like English or Spanish) .  The first form of languages are assembler languages which are specific to a CPU and not portable, the subsequent languages like C, C++, FORTRAN, Pascal provided more functionality with Database languages like 3GL, 4GL etc..

A computer can be a main frame, a desktop or your laptop which were confined to a area (room, your desk or your lap).

Advances in networking have provided efficient methods of distributing the CPU from Disks, Input/Output devices. 

Storage Area Networks are clusters of disk drives that are no longer directly connected to the computer using the various buss’s described above. This is a key level of abstraction which has allowed distributed computing to evolve into GRID computing where the software is one place, the CPUs in another and memory in yet another.  Distributed computing provides more efficient use of computing at unparalleled  level of disaster recovery.

Why is this important? 

Computing has and will continue to be the mother of invention for advances not only in the hardware or software but also in the networks that connect everything together like the Internet or also an Enterprise VPN.

More later :

Virtualization – Part 3  - The Abstraction of Applications
Concepts of a Application Programmers Interface (API),  examples and pitfalls for APIs and the abstraction of  Web Services.

OK, so Web Services has been around for some time now.  XML and SOAP have been used as an easy to implement mechanism to serve as an API for distributed applications.  However, only until the last year or so has web services come to the forefront of telecom services, and I believe it will be used as a foundation for many innovative solutions that will be built under the Unified Communications/Integrated Communications umbrella.

VoIP has traditionally been relegated to basic telephony services in the telecom industry, such as VoIP/SIP Trunking and Hosted IP Telephony services.  However, with the advent of Unified Communications (check out the Unified Communications Conference at the Fall VON Show in October), which brings together telephony, messaging, collaboration, data and mobility into an integrated solution, we begin to see services using VoIP as becoming more visual in nature, bringing telephony into web interfaces rather than to phones, and using multiple distributed applications which are blended to create solutions.

Global Crossing has announced that it is providing innovative Unified Communications solutions to the UK Government.  These services will soon be expanded to provide even greater capabilities to the Enterprise, and globalization is a key element of this strategy.

Does this mean IMS?  Not necessarily.  Many solutions in the market have built interoperability through vendor partnerships using SIP from a voice signaling perspective, and Web Services brings another element into the mix which greatly improves interoperability and improves usability.  IMS is not nearly as innovative as Web Services, and certainly not as easily implemented.  However, IMS can be combined with Web Services to anchor control, signaling, and provisioning of multiple applications in a standardized fashion.  My belief is that it will take the industry some time to pull everything together using IMS.

As an example of how web services can be introduced into telephony, clients can be built into web pages using internet API's which use click to call functionality.  In addition, web services can be used in a unified communications "Dashboard" interface where a user can view presence status, conference attendance, manage services through voice portals, and trigger entirely new communications business models.  Two innovating vendors highly leveraging web services in the telecom space are Sylantro and Iperia, which bring call control and management extended to web communications, and provide visual voicemail and unified messaging services as a solution.  Very cool stuff.

Web Services brings easy programming interfaces to industry standard transport (HTTP) to bring innovation to telecom services.  As enterprises become more distributed in nature, with remote offices in multiple countries, their key workers are also becoming more distributed and mobile.  Telecom needs to keep up with these trends and the increading demand for requirements of the changing workplace with real time communications.  This is bringing traditionally separate applications together via Unified Communications, and the "unification" or blending of these distributed applications can use a combination of signaling techniques and web services functions to bring a highly visual element to the solution.

It gets a little irritating in reading the media’s somewhat negative stance on the recent release of the iphone .

If you have followed Apple over the years, you will find a company who constantly can innovate and lead industry change.

A few examples we all take for granted:

1. 1984 ,  The world’s 1^st mass market windows GUI the Mac is  launched during the superbowl.  They took pieces of technology previously developed by Xerox PARC,  created a vision and  brought it to the world. It was Apple the company and not the technology creator Xerox.
2. 1993 , The world’s 1^st mass market PDA equipped with a 20Mhz RISC processor running on (4) AA batteries.  Apple took a U turn and went up market with subsequent message pads 110, 120, 130, 2000 and 2100.  The device was borne of true innovation creating a platform that challenged previous computers from Norand,  Symbol and GRID.  It failed due to high cost structures and not being able to meet price sensitivity  defined by the market winners like Palm. (By the way, Apple understood price sensitivity as  they found volumes rise as they sold below cost to clear inventories to make way for the planned roadmap). It also failed due to lack of integrated communications.
3. 2007,  the iphone.

Here is something to consider,  we are now hearing that there is another “nano iphone” being planned  , is it last minute planning , or something larger with more phone products that bracket incumbent mobile devices , while flooding and fine tuning the market with Apple patented innovation.

My bet is they learned a lot from the Newton and now will apply it to a very ripe market and use media to their best interest in being a market maker.