My Mother Uses Skype – Why Bother With Standards?
April 15, 2007
By Kfir Pravda
A panel discussion from Spring VON 2007 in San Jose, California, exploring the question of the advantages of open standards vs. proprietary software in the world of VoIP deployments. With the runaway success of Skype, members of IMTC and one brave Skype employee ask, why bother with standards?
Moderator: Anatoli Levine – Sr. Director, Software Support and Services, RADVISION
Jonathan Christensen – Sr. Director, Skype
Håkon Dahle – Chief Technologist, TANDBERG
Kfir Pravda – President, Pravda Marketing Services
Peter Saint-Andre – Director of Standards, Jabber Inc.
Shantanu Sarkar – Sr. Manager, Cisco Systems
Chris Steck – Director of Technology Strategy, RealNetworks
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Until video becomes personal
March 22, 2007
When you are at such an exciting technology conference as VON is, of course the desire is to see and hear every talk – and of course, it doesn’t work like this, especially considering RADVISION booth duties and IMTC promotion and networking. But I was very happy that I managed to attend Zohar Zisapel talk about video. Zohar is RADVISION Chairman of the Board, and a Video over IP industry veteran.
I really liked what I heard, probably because it resonated so much with my own perspective on the real-time Video. Just to reflect back, I had startling moment at IMTC Fall Forum 2001 in Seattle, where Rich Baker, one of the PictureTel founders, said the following: “in the enterprise, Video is not mission-critical application, and voice and e-mail are”. This was something I never realized before, and from that moment on, I kept repeating that sentiment almost as a mantra.
Enterprises don’t have compelling reason to put video on every desktop… until video becomes personal. Until people will be able to use video to connect to their families and friends, there will be no driving force behind video on every desktop. And this is what Zohar was talking about and vividly demonstrating with a number of excellent video clips. The ubiquitous video connectivity is becoming part of our daily life (well, not necessarily in US, yet).
With advent of 3G mobile telephony the ability to see your kids at any time, and to witness remote events, and to conduct business meetings from the beach is simply priceless. And as Zohar pointed out, video does worth a thousand words, as he clearly demonstrated with last clip in his presentation, showing a number of short silent video fragments, which were delivering very powerful emotions.
And then there was only one question coming from the audience (and that was the question I was expecting to hear) – when 3G will come to US. Well, nobody was able to answer that question, but with all the new phones, supporting Wi-Fi, 3G and EVDO, my hopes are really high that even US will come out from the stone cellular age. Now, we just need to ensure all those technologies are interoperable…
Are Open Standards helpful and beneficial?
March 20, 2007
Open standards play a vital role in today’s communications. Traditional PSTN telephony, which is still empowering most of the world to communicate, wired and wireless IP networks, Internet, World Wide Web – all of this technologies we are so used to are based on Open Standards.
At the same time, open standards have their own “dark” side. They require heavy investment of time and money to develop – top notch experts from all over the world spend lots of time working on the standards. Once developed, implementation and deployment are also costly, as interoperability needs to be tested and verified. Additionally, the need to “play by the [open standard] rules” might adversely impact time to market.
A lot of today’s success stories, as Skype, for instance, are closed end systems. You don’t spend lots of time trying to reach consensus in ego and politics fight, you deploy when you ready, you control who connects to your network, you change implementation as you see fit – and this list of advantages can be easily continued.
So in the end of the day, are Open Standards helpful and beneficial or not? Do they push technology forward or become a stumbling block? IMTC (International Multimedia Telecommunications Consortium), together with PulverMedia, assembled panel of experts who will help us to find answers to some of these questions.
