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A View From The Road – Volume 1, Number 3
Observations on technology trends from the latest conferences
and seminars.
 In
This Edition:
• Greetings from Interop
• It’s about the
network
• The selective rear
view mirror
• Telepresence
World
This balmy 85
degree day finds me in Las Vegas again at
the Mandalay Bay Conference
Center for the Interop conference.
Interop’s slogan this year is
“Business. Technology. One week.
One place.” (A very
appropriate phrase considering I’ve only been at this conference for 24
hours and it seems like I’ve been in one place for one week.) I’m hardly an Interop
veteran – this being my first time attending, but with quite a few Comdex
conferences under my belt I have some background to draw upon. It is estimated that there are about
20,000 people in attendance and over 450 exhibitors this year, figures Interop General manager Lenny Heymann
said represent a 10% increase over last year. Mr. Heymann’s
opening remarks also made the point that the linkage of hardware and
software is becoming tighter, and as a natural progression of this, the
“Software 2008” conference will be co-located with Interop
next year.
The message being
stressed by many of the firms exhibiting here is that “the network” is the
platform on which the future will live.
We no longer have the luxury to see what we do in discrete terms
with an application here, a hardware box there, etc. Everything will be interconnected,
inter-reliant and mobile - with Data, Voice, Video and Mobility making the
quintessential “quad-play”. Web 2.0
is the phrase being used to describe this next generation of web
collaboration, with social and business collaboration tools taking over as
the model we base our interactions upon.
Right out at the
forefront of this parade is the Chairman and CEO
of Cisco Systems, John Chambers.
During his keynote address to open the conference he was part
historian, part evangelist, part annoyed executive (“…go back to the last
slide…back again I said…”), and part salesman. Clearly anyone hearing his presentation
as he walks through the audience and –not-
buying all of Cisco’s products did not get enough of the Kool-aid to drink.
In truth Cisco’s
products are at the heart of the most reliable and advanced organizations
in the world. Mr. Chambers is owed
tremendous kudos for the masterful growth of his company into the 165
billion dollar giant it is. His look
back at his past predictions showed he had an amazing talent for
visualizing the future. You must
understand then why I almost fell off my chair when he announced to the
audience that “…video is the new killer app….” Forgive me, but just because you run one
of the biggest firms on the planet doesn’t mean you’re permitted to rewrite
history. Unfortunately, in the video
collaboration area this is exactly what Cisco has continually attempted to
do. Mr. Chambers and his minions
would show you a person at another location on a 60” plasma screen and hail
it as miracle worthy of sainthood.
Cisco Telepresence is being marketed a great breakthrough in
technology, when in reality it is a great breakthrough in marketing. Video conferencing has been able to do
what Telepresence claims for more than 15 years. In the video conferencing world though
you need to be able to support the day to day needs of the user –
interoperability, multiple features, odd configurations, etc. The marketing breakthrough of
Telepresence is to remove the interoperability, remove the features, demand
that the space and/or the network conform to preset notions, then claim the
product is simple. It took all the
energy I had not to jump-up and ask Mr. Chambers why the Cisco PC video
conference product he was also showing could not connect to the
Telepresence product 20 feet away from it on the same stage.
I’m reminded of
H.L. Mencken’s famous quote that states “For every complex problem there is
an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.”
Cisco Telepresence as it was originally introduced was an
oversimplified, expensive, network-hogging solution that was personally
pitched to the “C” level by Mr. Chambers (to the chagrin of every technology
manager that understood the space.)
Take off the steering wheel, make all the roads one size, limit the
places you need to go and you have the perfect luxury car – well, sort-of I
guess.
In fairness, Cisco
now has a roadmap for Telepresence that includes interoperability with
other video conference devices, a version of multipoint, etc. I see less of the “we’re not video
conferencing” arrogance it originally had.
However, with a five minute reboot cycle compared to every other
product in the space at around a minute, Cisco still has some lessons to
learn from the history of video conferencing.
Speaking of
Telepresence, the next View From The Road will be a wrap-up report from two
conflicting conferences the first week of June. Telepresence World (a new conference
around the new space) will be taking place in San Diego at just about the
same time as the Wainhouse Research Summit is bringing together people in
San Francisco.
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A View From The Road is written by
David Danto and contains solely his own opinions. David has spent 30 years in
the audio visual and broadcasting industries. He has designed facilities
for firms such as AT&T, Bloomberg LP, FNN, Morgan Stanley and NYU. He
is currently the Director of Global Multimedia Engineering for Lehman
Brothers and the IMCCA’s Director of Emerging
Technology. Email David at David.Danto.IMCCA@Danto.com
About IMCCA
The Interactive
Multimedia & Collaborative Communications Alliance (IMCCA) is a
not-for-profit user application and industry focused association with
membership comprised of service and product providers, consultants, and
users. Members benefit from the understanding and the use of various
interactive and collaborative communications technologies in their
professional and everyday lives.
For further information please contact Carol Zelkin, IMCCA Executive
Director, at 516-818- 8184 or czelkin@imcca.org. Visit the IMCCA web site
at www.imcca.org
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