Report from Supercomm 2005
pacific-tier.com
McCormick Place, Chicago USA
June 5-9 2005
supercomm2005.com
Sometimes it seems over the past 15 years the telecommunications
conference industry has grown with equal or greater fervor than
telecom and the Internet itself. Perhaps the finest telecom-related
conference ever held was the 1995 Internet Society annual conference
held at the Sheraton Waikiki, where the majority of activities
purely indulged in the joy of participating in the true roots of the
Internet revolution.
That was a conference! The sessions were discussing and debating
real topics - real topics relevant to development of the Internet on
a global scale. Participants of Inet '95 are forever etched in the
annals of Internet development. I went to Inet '96 in Montreal, and
to be honest, the only thing I remember is that Inet '96 was held
during the same period as the Montreal Jazz Festival. The music was
superb, and the week spent in Montreal was one of the most fun of my
life. Can't really remember much of the conference, as it started
taking on characteristics of a large sales meeting. Rather than
accomplishing anything useful relative to the Internet industry, you
saw legions of high powered sales folk wearing golf shirts with
logos and names of companies long since gone the way of fossil fuels.
Supercomm 2005 was a sales conference. There were a couple of
related sidebars, such as Pulver's VoIP (Voice over Internet
Protocol) conference (available for about a thousand dollars -- you
had the honor of paying to attend a propaganda session run by the
Pulver organization).
There were only a couple service providers present at the
conference. The rest of the conference centered on equipment and
application vendors. Back to the slick, high powered sales people
who probably could not spell VoIP two out of three times, but had on
the standard uniforms of khaki trousers and a golf shirt accoutered
with a slick logo representing a company that will probably not last
beyond Thanksgiving. Expensive booths extolling the virtues of
their latest VoIP switch, software, fiber optic fusion splicer, or
2005 rendition of a fiber termination block. The booth has a few
private rooms where slick, high powered sales people can make deals
happen (I don't think I ever saw a booth with people actually in the
booth).
With due humility, I probably manage one of the most densely packed
telecom facilities in the world, if not the most connected meet-me-
room and carrier hotel in the world. We buy a lot of hardware, and
spend a lot of time developing service models to support emerging
and existing technologies and telecom service models. Of course the
slick, high powered sales people representing companies which may
not be around past Thanksgiving have never heard of my company or
facility, so when I tried to stimulate a conversation with one of
the afore mentioned it usually resulted in a "we've never heard of
this company" expression and quick exit.
Heh...
To be honest I had a lot of fun walking around looking at the new
toys being prepared for introduction into our telecom market. It is
pretty easy to see the terror existing in old companies such as
Nortel, Alcatel, Lucent, and Siemens as they watch Sonus, NACT,
Excel, and Cisco starting to eat their lunch in the rapidly growing
VoIP equipment industry. Nortel will tell the world they have the
largest installed base of VoIP equipment in the world, although in
our building - with several hundred VoIP companies operating - I
know of no Nortel VoIP switches in operation. They are running
scared. In our facility it is too expensive to take a DMS 250 out
of a room and resell or refurbish the switch, so most companies
decommissioning a large DMS or 5ESS are simply band sawing the
switches in place and trash compacting them out of the building.
The Sonus guys were having a great time (they also knew my company
and building and were happy to discuss ideas of how to better build
products and services to meet the needs of our growing tenants and
industry). The Sonus guys are replacing AXE10s, 5ESSs, DMSs, and
other telephone switches which are too expensive to operate, are
under powered, and do not have the utility of a soft switch and a
VoIP switch like the Sonus. The difference in sales approachs
between the Sonus guys and telephone switch vendor guys is similar
to the difference between a used car salesman and a salesman selling
high end real estate in Rancho Palos Verdes.
There was a very large contingent from the Chinese company Huawei,
as well as Future Wei. It is very clear, regardless of whether or
not China heavily promotes domestic or international VoIP, that
Chinese equipment vendors are well poised to participate in the VoIP
equipment market.
The main theme of Supercomm 2005 was VoIP. There is no question
VoIP is the next phase of human-to-human communication. It is not a
question of if you are using VoIP, rather it is a question of when
you will use VoIP. While I personally find the high powered sales
aspect of conferences tedious, I did walk away with the knowledge my
company, and all telecom-related companies, must come to grips with
broadband global communications.
Happy communicating
John Savageau
SVP OPperations
CRG-West, One Wilshire Building
Los Angeles, California USA |
