VoIP is dead- Long live VoIP!

30 years from now when historians debate the "age of technology", they will have a laundry list of "in" things for 2007. Mash-ups, Web 2.X, social networking, iPhone (and its clones?) just to name a few.

What they are not likely to have on the list is Voice-over-IP. Is VoIP dead already? Au contraire mon ami. VoIP is about to join another list- those initially ultra hyped technologies that take a such a long time to take hold in the market that we don't realize how pervasive they have become. When we look back, we are likely to say that 2007 was when SunRocket came a tumblin' down, Vonage dusted off their MBA degree and adopted profit as their prime reason d'etre, and VoIP, just dissapeared into the dictionary of arcana while most of us were using it to merrily reach out and touch someone. Perhaps its my faded birth certificate or the number of technology life cycles that I have subjected my body to in the valley... Whatever may be source of inspiration for a nom-de guerre I will evetually adopt, I am secretly glad that at last, a cycle that I have been dreaming, marketing, and selling is truly coming of age.

Read more on the adult life of VoIP at http://www.voip-news.com/feature/how-voip-revolution-ended-080807/

Catching up on VON- San Jose

I am just catching up on comments from VON... This was the first, in a few years, where VON was particularly quiet... It feels as if there is a maturation of the VoIP industry (a good thing...)

There were many video related applications that touted models for video distribution via P2P, video social networking etc. Not clear how long these will last or which ones will survive...

My favorite find was audible magic (www.audiblemagic.com), a company that can recognize licensed musical content as it passes through any network location! Very interesting science behind recognition of music under pretty much any compression scheme...

IMS

I attended the IMS Evolution Summit last week in Coral Gables, Florida, organized by IQPC. Excellent organization, attended by nearly 50 of the who's who in telecom, who are pondering upon the changes being brought by IMS....

Observations:

#1 IMS is becoming real.... Real in the sense that we are understanding the value it brings- applications, applications applications. At the same time, the industry is re-learning what is becoming deja vu all over again. That is, the transition from legacy networks, whether its it TDM or soft-switch, is one of the largest challenges to overcome.

#2 IMS will be an evolution, not revolution. Beyond the legacy issue, many of the capabilities IMS promised is now becoming available on pre-IMS solutions. IMS now has to offer even more to be able to overcome the natural evolution of the existing systems

#3 Interoperability is making progress, yet is not complete... Results from testing with the Multi-Service forum suggest that basic interop is now mature, while interop at the higher layers needs more time.