Editor's Letter: In With the ‘Old’

Last month, I wrote about what was “hot” in 2007. (In 500 words or less, my top picks, as you may recall, were software as a service, mobility, unified communications and SIP trunking.) This month, I thought I’d try my hand at predictions for what will be hot in 2008.

At the risk of being repetitive, all of my selections for 2007 will continue to take hold and grow in 2008. Our industry tends to fixate on things that are near-vaporware and let them take years to become viable. Case in point: I was writing about VoIP in the mid-’90s and was as shocked as anyone when, a decade later, 2004 was pronounced the “Year of VoIP.” The deciding factor apparently was the mainstreaming of VoIP among consumers. So, in that vein, here are some other “old, but new” things that I think finally may reach critical mass.

• Managed Services. The managed services business model suffers from ill definition and in my opinion that has prevented it from becoming the tour de force that it most certainly can be. The idea that a customer’s voice and data networks — WAN and LAN — can be remotely managed is simply logical for a large segment of the business community, particularly SMBs. While early managed services providers were built with that express purpose, today many channel partners, hardware vendors and telcos have evolved their businesses to provide managed services to their end users. There are many variations of managed services providers, some single-purposed (e.g., network security) and some more comprehensive (e.g. voice and data network performance, gear performance, service/feature performance, security, etc.). This contributes to the confusion over the definition, but the value proposition is the same — pay-as-you-go outsourcing for increasingly complex services with guarantees of future-proof technology updates.

• Carrier Ethernet. Ethernet in the LAN is an old technology, dating back to the ’70s. Its newer version evolved within the last decade to extend Ethernet to the WAN for economical data transport. Bigger businesses already are buying it for data center links and Internet access. Bandwidth-hogging applications (video and maybe some of the new SaaS titles) are requiring ever smaller businesses to up their capacities. Ethernet, where it is available, is an increasingly popular choice. While the market is still sorting out the quality and pricing norms, channel partners are going to find Ethernet is going to be a bigger part of their portfolios this year.

• Fixed-Mobile Convergence. Here’s another one that we’ve been talking about for a long time. We are getting to FMC in baby steps. Within a campus or office, the ability to use a dual-mode wireless/wireline phone is becoming increasingly available, if not deployed. Most IP PBX vendors have such an option on offer using Wi-Fi or other protocols used in cordless phones to send voice over 900MHz, 2.4GHz and 5.8GHz to enable this mobility. True FMC, integrating mobile cellular networks with fixed networks, also is coming to market. T-mobile last June announced its FMC product, T-Mobile HotSpot @Home, a groundbreaking new wireless service designed to provide consumers with one phone for all their home and mobile calling needs. And in the fall, XO Communications and Sotto Wireless announced a trial in Seattle that will provide business users Internet access, PBX, Wi-Fi, cellular voice and e-mail, and a Nokia E61i dual-mode handset — all wrapped up with hosted Microsoft Exchange and a portal to track traffic and wireless charges. If all goes well, the service will rollout to other markets and XO’s channels. These are just two examples of many that prove that FMC might make its mark in 2008.

There are probably other things I could have mentioned — Web. 2.0, Voice 3.0, etc. — but these things are not necessarily where the money is being made at present; witness FaceBook and MySpace’s efforts to monetize their popular social networking sites. Instead, I chose to focus on the more practical opportunities. In telecom, it’s not “out with the old, in with the new,” but more often the other way around.

Regards,

Khali Henderson
Group Editor