Israel: the Land of Honey and VoIP
February 2007
Cisco's recent ad says it all: Work is anywhere. I’ve become a big fan of that word, anywhere because it sums up very neatly the technological and social phenomena converging to change the way we think about virtually all our activities.
Today, my work happens to be in Israel, "The land of honey and VoIP," says David Schwartz, CTO of Kayote (see below). It's Day 3 of a whirl of meetings with connectivity technology firms of all sizes and maturities. The one thing that binds them (besides IP, of course) is a shared view of the next technology horizon—the Anywhere Network. Just a few hours here are all you need to for proof we are moving to a pervasive, seamless, high-capacity, highly capable network.
Some innovators to consider:
- Xeround: The phrase "telco databases" might sound dull, until you realize that a completely orthogonal approach to tracking subscriber activities real-time, one that accounts for the variety of services they are beginning to use from the network provider, can transform the provider's speed and cost to provide those services. A nice break from the IMS media barrage -- but more proof that the network itself is getting smarter.
- Kayote: David Schwartz and his partner Baruch Sterman take on dynamic VoIP interoperability and security issues in their hosted VoIP management offerings, saving clients the costs and delays with on-site solutions and allowing carriers to offer VoIP to a wider swath of enterprise clients than their native economics allow.
- Allot: When bandwidth is unlimited, who cares that much about how it's being used? Conversely, as bandwidth consumption leaps, optimizing network performance starts to pay off. Quality of service (QoS) initiatives need insight on what's going on in the network; Allot's deep packet inspection tools provide it.
- Olista: A recent Yankee Group Report lambastes mobile network operators for rolling out value-added services that aren't part of a larger lifecycle management philosophy. Olista's coinage of the term service adoption management points out the opportunity to move from the spaghetti approach (see what sticks) to more thoughtful usage analysis and development.
- Pickmark: The most gestational firm I met with, Pickmark is developing a simple, elegant solution for owners of video content to track rights, views and ad exposures. I won't spill any more just yet, but it's definitely an Anywhere experience—multiplatform in some smart ways.
How did my 72 hours in Israel end today? After 21 meetings with twenty-first century technology innovators, I made a brief stop at the Western Wall, built in the fifth century BC, just minutes from Kayote's VoIP interconnectivity gurus. The warm stone, the wet rain, and the murmurs of the reverent visitors reassured me that in the Anywhere world, I was indeed somewhere real.