Leveraging Industry Standards for Success – A Case Study

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 been dramatically affected by technological forces.  The circuit-switched network is being replaced by IP networks throughout the world, as I noted in a previous post.  As a result, all fax communications company have had to develop a strategy for the transition to IP. The vendor community anticipated this in the late Nineties and key new standards for sending fax messages over IP were developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). The IETF focused on integrating fax with Internet email and the ITU split its efforts between supporting the IETF Internet Fax standards by reference (T.37) and devising a new standard for real-time fax communications (T.38).

Standards adoption often takes time and such was the case for IP fax. There were some early adopters of the email based approach (for example, Panafax and Cisco), but despite backing by both the ITU and IETF, the market didn’t take off. One big reason was the emergence of voice communications over IP (VoIP), primarily based upon the IETF’s Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), which gained increasing momentum during the first decade of the 21st century.

Several of us in the ITU and IETF took a small but critical step which allowed T.38 IP fax to ride this wave. In the year 2000, we completed an annex to T.38 which specified how it could be used with SIP.  As a result, when implementors wanted to add fax support to their SIP-based Voice over IP solutions, the steps required to enable a Voice over IP session to spawn a T.38 fax session had already been specified in a T.38 annex. During this same period, Voice over IP gateways were emerging as the preferred approach to connect the existing circuit-based network to the emerging IP network based on SIP. Cisco and other gateway manufacturers such as Audiocodes and Cantata (later renamed Dialogic) cut over to T.38 as their favored solution to support fax over IP.  The fax board manufacturers such as Brooktrout (later Dialogic) followed suit and T.38 became the most widely adopted solution for Fax over IP.  The use of T.38 for IP fax was also supported by the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) for 4th generation mobile networks and by the SIP Connect initiative for SIP Trunking driven by the SIP Forum.

When I was advising my fax industry clients in the late Nineties, I suggested they keep a close eye on the trends in both fax over IP and Voice over IP in deciding upon their product directions. At this time, the IETF standards for Internet Fax via email got early momentum, but in the standards community, we kept working on both the email and real-time IP fax solutions. As noted above, the step of ensuring that T.38 could eventually be used with SIP in a standards-based solution became very important as Voice over IP became a much bigger industry trend than Fax over IP.  As a result, fax solutions that would work over the emerging voice over IP networks became successful and are still being sold by many communications vendors today. The story didn’t stop there. There are other important trends that have emerged in recent years such as the needs for enhanced security and the transition from physical products to software-based solutions in the Cloud that communications vendors need to bake into their strategies going forward.

If you have been in business scenario where leveraging industry standards helped your company’s products gain success, please feel free to weigh in with your comments. If you’d like to explore strategies on how to evolve your company’s solutions and leverage current or potential industry standards, you can reach me on LinkedIn or on our web site.

James Rafferty has been active in the worlds of telecommunications, standards and university teaching in a variety of roles. He's been a thought leader in areas such as Voice over IP and Internet fax through his consulting, product management, marketing, writing and standards activities, and he is currently teaching business at Northeastern University. He loves to write and talk about new connections, applications and business models as communications, related technologies and business concepts evolve.

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