The highs of the 'IP crush'

It still feels funny to say it aloud: Telephone companies are mad for IP.

It's almost a so-what statement these days. Yet two or three years ago, it was anybody's guess how telephone companies would deal with the threat the Internet and voice-over-IP services levied against their businesses.

Now, not only will carriers accommodate Internet protocol, but they are all racing each other to marry it with their own real-time broadband voice technologies. Even AT&T and BT-two of the industry's most stately carriers-jointly praised IP as one of the key technologies that made their new joint venture possible.

All this sudden respect and infatuation for IP is remarkable. But there could be some bumps and trouble in that.

I'm speaking from experience. I had my first crush and my first real taste of possibilities when I was in the third grade. That was also when I had my first broken heart.

The cutest girl in the world was named Diane, and she sat right next to me. Even as an 8-year-old, Diane had that simple magic that convinced me that girls were worth paying attention to. She had deep brown eyes and dark brown hair and was very good at art and dodge ball. She could do things that I couldn't, and do them with such style. I was a goner.

She also had a funny little habit, a way of scratching the back of her neck when she got nervous about taking a test or getting called on by our hell-on-wheels teacher Mrs. Leach. Once I picked up on it, that little signal meant she wasn't sure of an answer. Once decoded, it also became my signal to come to the rescue. Sometimes I would point to an answer in a textbook, sometimes scrawl it on some scrap paper. It was bliss when she finally started letting me whisper it in her ear.

Necessary but remarkable. That's how crushes start, I think.

Even in telephony. Think of it this way: IP is necessary, no less remarkable. How? Well, like this. Adding an open-standard IP technology to the telephone backbone achieves in one stroke for data a miracle that took hundreds of different telephone companies across the world more than 50 years to accomplish. That miracle is, "any-to-any interconnection."

As remarkable as any-to-any capability is, it shouldn't be the end-all.

While carriers are congratulating themselves for embracing IP, other companies are taking the next step.

Siemens-Nixdorf, for example, is pushing a new wrinkle on the familiar computer telephony integration business way beyond screen pops. Siemens wants to let companies that use enterprise resource planning applications get at them directly from regular telephones-not just from call centers. Siemens is already teaming up with SAP, a leading enterprise resource planning developer, to provide the integration within a year.

Tying these two technologies together would alert users via their telephones to updates in the database. On the drawing board are plans to lets users and customers use simple voice-recognition calls to conduct enterprise resource planning.

Elsewhere, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco and others are looking to merge IP with VPN quality of service for Web sites, helping companies give preferential access to their best customers. Novell and Sun want to merge IP and Java into ways to provide user-aware security and access controls.

With IP-based possibilities like this, carriers need to become more aware of the kinds of applications their new SuperTrain networks are destined to carry. Or jilted feelings are bound to result.

I can speak from experience there, too. Things went great with Diane during my 3rd grade winter, but come my 3rd grade spring, my "special" status started to wane. First, recess moved from the gym to outside, and I didn't exactly measure up to my more basketball- and hockey-adept classmates. Second, as spring turned to early summer, tests got easier-or less frequent. Even hell-on-wheels Mrs. Leach seemed to lighten up. It wasn't long before Diane left my scrawled notes unread and never again dropped her head near my shoulder to listen for an answer.

This is not a sad story (not now, anyway). First crushes are just like that. What may be sad is that some carriers mad for IP may not have the same kind of time I had to get over it.