On Rad’s Radar
Net-Head Part II
Last month I wrote about the shift in mentality between traditional Bell-head telco types and the data-centric net-head. In a move that can be considered net-head-ish, everything is moving to the cloud, including voice.
That’s right, hosted PBX (News - Alert) is now cloud communications.
When Thomas Howe is discussing voice mashups, PBX hooks some to mind – taking an application and adding voice, like click-to-call or text-to-voice.
Developers have taken it a step further with attempts to virtualize Asterisk (News - Alert) boxes – the first step toward PBX in the cloud because what is virtualization but making an application available through a server cluster platform.
The Cloud Communications Alliance launched nationwide high-definition enterprise voice and data network in the IP cloud – ostensibly for HD voice peering, but it is a migration of the hosted PBX into the cloud. ITSPs will now be cloud communications providers. Voice is just one application running on the PBX. Presence, conferencing, and the host of other UC parts will just be modules and add-ons to the basic voice app you get from your SIP provider.
Even the FCC states that mobile access of applications will become dominant. It’s not just Facebook (News - Alert) and Twitter that folks want to access from their mobiles. The cloud is becoming more important to our daily interactions with data. Bell-heads can’t help you here. This environment needs IP-centric net-heads to design, build and maintain these data systems and networks.
It isn’t just about the servers or the data centers or the WANs or Internet backbones. It’s about reliability, up time, security, access, back up, redundancy, XHTML/WML programming and an incredible amount of data storage (that is increasing exponentially daily). Being able to see this whole ecosystem will be the first success step for the agent in the net world. Everything is an application. And with that an agent has a huge opportunity for sales. IT
Peter Radizeski is head of telecom consulting agency RAD-INFO (News - Alert) Inc. (http://rad-info.net/).
