Brough Turner is the CTO with NMS Communications, a leader in mobile applications. His Communications blog is one of my regular reads. He provides great viewpoints on spectrum, patents, VoIP, mobile and a variety of other technology issues.

Today he posted this from VON:

Applications, not platforms

I spent some time in the exhibit hall at VON this afternoon.  One thing that struck me was the large number of companies offering service platforms.  These ranged from BEA to Lucent to Ubiquity, IP Unity, Personeta.  Operators don't buy platforms.  They may say they want platforms, but they buy applications, and typically only applications that have been shown to be profitable somewhere else.  It's one thing if these companies were at VON trying to recruit developers, but most of them are selling a platform for which they are explicitly or implicitly the sole source of applications.

Let me reinforce a point from that snip - Operators don't buy platforms.  They may say they want platforms, but they buy applications...

Platforms are architectures to nowhere. If an operator doesn't have a platform in place by now, they're already in trouble. But more importantly, users could care less about platforms.
Platforms don't excite or engage users. Customers. Customers want applications, but they don't even really want or care about the application. Customers want solutions that work.

Something that concerns me a bit the past couple of months is the inward focus VoIP technology too often takes. In particular, I read earlier today that VON seems to have two major focuses in this session --  consumers and video. VoIP is quickly painting itself into the corner of disinterest as VoIP providers, both hardware and software, focus on the platform, not the solution.

VoIP developers congratulate one another on how well their code seamlessly integrates with a bit of this or a bit of that, but far too many players in VoIP, hence in unified communications, are focused on how well they play together rather than how well the deliver real solutions to customers, especially enterprise customers. I can't remember the last really cool enterprise solution I wrote about, although there have been some.

Residential customers don't give a rabbit's fart about VoIP. They want telephony. They don't care what the underlying plumbing is. They really don't. As dire as Vonage's future really us, residential users are pretty mcuh ok with reselling dialtone and pretty oblivous to the underlying technology. Give them a service they want at a price.

I'm worried that VoIP, which has the potential to advance unified communication, is for many players a stagnation factor that will be their undoing. Wake up VoIP sector. While VoIP has approached and is achieving takeoff speed, the airplane could still crash and burn on the runway if you don't actually serve customer's needs. You're in danger, and many of you are so busy congratulating yourselves that you don't see where you're headed.

There are some notable exceptions of course, but in general, I still worry about the VoIP sector being able to succeed, even this far down the road.


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