Telecom is an example of an industry that has created national and international standards for communications in ways that benefit companies large and small. As a consultant, I’ve frequently advised companies about specific standards and how they can be aligned with business strategies. Let’s consider an example. During the last 15 years, facsimile communications has…
The Internet of Things is widely perceived as a hot market and has the usual hockey stick projections of massive growth laid out by market researchers such as Gartner and IHS Markit. In this post, I’d like to consider one broad slice of the IoT market, the Industrial Internet of Things (aka IIoT), which applies…
In the late Nineties, the Telecom business was dominated by big companies who had built their phone network over many years using switching technology. But a massive storm was on the horizon as the same IP technology which helped revolutionize commerce on the world wide web started to be applied to phone-based voice communications. Early…
In the late 1990s, the Internet and the World Wide Web created massive technical disruption for the worlds of document communications and messaging. Now, nearly twenty years later, business communications looks much different than it did going into the Millennium and once major businesses such as the marketing of enterprise fax machines are deep into…
In the middle of the 1990s, the Internet and its associated IP protocols were like a huge wave that was off the shore of the business world, but poised to come in and cause massive disruption. At that time, I ran a consulting business for telecom clients (Human Communications) and was active on several fronts…
In my last few posts, I’ve described several factors which have encouraged communications solution providers to transition away from hardware and focus on software-based application solutions. Let’s consider two companies and how they adjusted the path of their technical and business models to address these directions. Avaya is an example of a company whose solutions…
This post is about a critical technical development in the history of Voice over IP which had a wide-reaching impact on the development of voice and related communications solutions. I’m referring to IP media, which was introduced early in the 2000s and has been ramping up every since. In my last two posts, we discussed…
This is the latest in a series of posts on how voice development has been moving from hardware to software centered models. In my last post, we reviewed the classic approach to developing voice-centered solutions, which typically utilized voice boards. In this post, I’ll review how media gateways helped change the model. In the classic…
During the past three years, I had product management responsibilities for products which covered the spectrum from hardware-centered to software-centered development. In telecom, there’s been an evolution in development models as solution providers have taken a series of steps to gradually move away from hardware. However, like many technical trends, there is a long tail…
In my last post, I talked about the book written by historian and professor Jonathan Coopersmith entitled Faxed – The Rise and Fall of the Fax Machine. I left off as fax entered the late Eighties and became wildly popular. As Coopersmith recounts, this confounded the experts, who were expecting electronic messaging, videotext or a…
