VON: The Talking Head meets the talking heads

It’s fun just to hear Jeff Pulver, CEO of pulver.com, come up with new lyrical references for the way he feels about the industry. Last week in Seattle at the Spring VON Conference, which is now owned by Key3Media but is still very much a Jeff Pulver event, the instigator of IP innovation traded in his ‘60s McCartney/Lennon shtick for the ‘80s inspiration of the Talking Heads. It fit.

“Into the blue again, after the money’s gone,” was the line he used rather fittingly to describe what he and more than a few industry hopefuls saw as the beginning of a recovery in the IP telephony space.

In his opening keynote last week, Pulver praised attendees for their perseverance but implored them to get more innovative. He said the Fall VON conference would feature awards for companies that can deliver what he calls “purple minutes.” These are minutes generated from new, value-added services as opposed to “white minutes” which are generated merely by running traditional circuit-switched services over IP.

Pulver urged his audience to be courageous, saying “if everything in history was driven by the bottom line, we would still be talking ourselves out of the future.”

The image of IP telephony as a virus is changing, he said. “Established telecom companies tried to use regulation as the antibody, but regulation can only channel the growth of IP; it can’t stop it.”

Microsoft’s Jawad Khaki, vice president of Windows networking and communications, echoed a Pulver plea not to dismiss the enterprise customers when it comes to IP telephony. “Adoption doesn’t take place until the enterprise adopts,” he said.

Citing a positive reception for Microsoft XP, Jawad said that 17 million XP endpoints are now ready to deliver purple minutes and that new protocols such as SIP and SIMPLE, a SIP extension used in Windows Messenger, make every instant messaging client a potential VoIP endpoint.

Accurate or not, Jawad said he was encouraged to see that major companies were developing network technology as if IP would be the only network in the future.

That may be true, but “Cisco never met a protocol it didn’t like,” said Alistair Woodman, senior director of product marketing at Cisco. Woodman even declared, perhaps for the first time publicly, that SIP is “probably ready for primetime.”

But protocols are not the biggest roadblock to broadband and VoIP deployment. Despite the network overbuild in the last few years that “didn’t do any of us any favors,” Woodman said, “Developing broadband access is a huge issue for the VoIP community. Without getting devices hooked up, you will never have the volumes necessary to reduce costs.”

The theological battle over protocols is over, and IP won. “Service providers have no religion with IP,” Woodman said. “Our customers would run voice over ducks and chickens if it had the best internal rate of return.”

Henry Sinnreich, distinguished member of engineering for Worldcom, Zen Master of IP telephony and unabashed proponent of SIP technology said, “In these hard times, maybe a little religion would help.”

Sinnreich and his company buck the trend when it comes to Tier 1 carrier acceptance of VoIP. “The reality is that voice is better over IP,” he said. “Telephony is only a subset of IP communications, and it can be less good if you have lousy access to the Internet, but it can be just as good.”

Sinnreich also agreed with Pulver’s relegation of the IP PBX to the white minutes domain of public network service replication. However, he goes a step further by dismissing the softswitch altogether. “A softswitch is just as bad as a proprietary PBX. It is Internet-unaware and was built for long-distance bypass, and we all know what happened to that market,” he said.

Continuing the theme as if they had compared notes, speakers continued to harp on the need to think about telecom differently. “Are [we] so enamored with the work [we] have done that [we] are afraid to go into what’s new?” asked Fred Harris, senior vice president at Sprint.

Not that he was there personally, but Harris visited the Pre-Cambrian period, the 1950s, and wormholed his way 500 years into the future to find an answer to the existential question: What does it mean to think new?

He even examined his own company’s painful experiment called ION in which Sprint learned that “it is extremely difficult to do everything by yourself.”

Thinking new, according to Harris, is to stop thinking about making things better and to start giving people what they want. He said that people are more concerned with a consistent feel across different technologies that with customization on the desktop and pointed to network residing applications as one way of getting there.

The problem with applications is that no one can predict which one will take off. “That’s why you need the enabling technology underneath them or you won’t have a chance at coming up with an application that people will value,” Harris said.

He offered four examples of small ways to begin thinking differently. Rather than focusing on service recovery, we should think about service consistency. Instead of mass customization, we should concentrate on personalized services. Dynamic bandwidth allocation is better than dedicated bandwidth, and rather than service reservation, we should be thinking about total service integration.

Mitel CEO Don Smith added another example, one that seems simultaneously fundamental and profound. “Customers buy value, and we must recognize the role open standards play in delivering that value,” Smith said.

The customer’s benefit is not the first that comes to mind when thinking about the struggles within standards bodies. However, Smith urged the VoIP community to recognize de facto standards and endorse them.

“Inherently there is a tension between innovation, value creation and standards, which must change,” Smith said.

The final word comes from John Yoakum, senior manager of emerging business at Nortel Networks. “Just allow the demand to go where it needs to go.”

For information on show news see the related story, The VON Buyin’ Express.