I attended Tuesday through Thursday of the recent Supercomm conference in Atlanta this year, going to a couple of the open keynote sessions but otherwise spending time in the exhibit halls. To characterize the conference from my point of view it would be that there weren’t many surprises – and that wasn’t all bad:
Supercomm is really a big trade show with some associated conferences held by the IEC. The IEC sessions are always small in comparison with the exhibit floor, in part because they cost significantly more than entry to the exhibits only. From what I heard this year was no exception, though Doug Tait (Sun) told me his session on JAIN had a standing room crowd, a real departure from most. Perhaps it’s an indication that JAIN is maturing to the point where people are looking harder at it.
The last Supercomm I attended was in 2000. That one filled two exhibit halls completely. This one was spread over 3, with a fair amount of empty space around the edges of each, so perhaps the same total space as 2000 or even a bit less. It was quite surprising though to see an industry that the business world has declared dead spending major money on billboards, sign trucks, entertainment, and events, though perhaps not as freely as before. The lavish parties weren’t quite so lavish and invitations were a bit harder to come by than in the past. Vendors still gave away plenty of goodies at the booths, but there were more cheap t-shirts gimmicks, and muchies and fewer expensive trinkets. As before there were plenty of silly shows in the booths, though fewer professional entertainers. One of the more imaginative draws was Verisign (aka Illuminet) who had a large booth promoting trust in their networking services, including a “rock” tower which visitors could climb with the support from a climbing harnass. I didn’t try this one though I did take a few swings at another company’s golf simulator.
Traffic in the exhibit halls was brisk, though a lot of people in the show had exhibitor badges, and many told me that few people came from the major carriers. (In business meetings with several carriers in recent weeks most had no travel budget to send people).
Lots of discussion of partnerships and vendors selling products to vendors.
One of the talks I attended was John Chambers of Cisco, promting broadband. I really think broadband access is still a solution in search of a problem to solve for most people and in spite of the pleas by John Chambers it’s not going to hurt US competitiveness that American consumers wait longer to download music clips and can’t get as high quality in their animated ads. More than that though everything he showed looked like history, not vision. The technology to deliver broadband and to rapidly provision new services has been around for 20 years. The barriers are not technological.
This section is not in an way representative of the show, but more of my interests and comments on the ones I visited. For those who don’t know me, My field is basically communication software and services, so I didn’t spend a lot of time with the people selling iron, silicon, and glass.
I visited the booths of Lucent and it’s spinoffs as much as anything to find any old friends. Lucent’s booth looked much like the one I saw 2 years ago, probably no surprise (So did Nortel and many others). Lucent exhibited a wide variety of solutions organized according to what problems they solved. Anyone looking for information on a specific product wound up on a treasure hunt trying to figure out where it may be. There was as before lots on IP services, and on optical networking, both of which were huge topics this year, and not a whole lot of voice services. Agere and Avaya both had pominenet booths at the entrances to the exhibit halls from connecting corridors. Avaya was showing a lot of IP networking, while Agere was prominently displaying Orinoco in addition to it’s underlying devices.
Again, Nortel’s show looked much like the last one I saw (fortunately this time without the continous drone of the beatles “Come Together”, which must have driven the nearby exhibitors nuts). I didn’t find a lot of new stuff inside, but a friend told me that they did have an impressive exhibit of presence based communication buried in there. Nortel has spoken eloquently on presence at most of the VON events so it is no surprise that they would have a decent offering.
The alcatel booth was a bit out of the way, but equally large and a different look from before. (No circus performers though!) I went there looking for information on their SCP and application server products and found they weren’t exhibiting anything in that area. Mostly they were showing transport solutions. I did run into an old friend, Niel Ransom, now CTO of Alcatel, who kidded me that Alcatel’s market cap is now large than Lucent and Nortel combined.
Microsoft continues to demonstrate that it is serious about the communication business by showing up everywhere. In addition to basic software, Microsoft was heavily promoting their media capabilities. They had a 5.1 channel sound system with a living room setup to demonstrate using a PC to enhance video. The effects were cool enough, but you had to be in the right spot, and to me its not enough of a leap forward to redesign my living room. Microsoft was also exhibiting their video side by side with various standards. I didn’t really see the quantum difference here. Microsoft took a lot of heat for designing their own codecs at the last conference I went to and if the technologists were making the choices would have to be LOTS better than standard to justify it, but the technologists don’t rule here. Microsoft naturally showed windows messenger, windows CE, and their servers.
It must take courage these days to name your company anything “.com”. I visited mainly to learn more about the service creation community, an effort to establish standards for building and delivering services in carrier networks lead by Net.com, Accenture, and a few other founding members. This seems to be really pushed by the integrators, who were often stuck with the job of putting together networks for new entrants and sorting out the various incompatibilities. The charter of establishing standards for this is very broad and extremely ambitious. It’s a problem worth solving, but I personally don’t have high expectations for it.
NTT Docomo was one of two carrier booths I saw (The other being Sprint, which was not promoting their carrier role at all but their professional services and wholesale equipment business). NTT Docomo had a large booth promoting imode, with lots of gadgets to try. Video clips, video phones, location services, and other things. Their goal seems to be promoting iMode internationally as the route to 3G. The demonstrations were impressive, perhaps most because they were real (i.e. real phones, I have no idea how they did it but I presume they had a base station somewhere in the booth. One interesting moment was when I asked one of their people (and they probably had a person for every phone in the demo area so they were always there) what bit rate the video took and over what area it is available. The answer was 384Kb/s, and that that rate had only limited availability now but would be available throughout Japan within a few years. I didn’t tell him, but the answer clearly points out the challenge in bringing high bandwidth wireless to the US, where population density is much less and distances are much larger.
These folks were near my company’s private demonstration area so I walked through their booth many times before encountering Curtis Holmes, formerly of Lucent, and realizing that this was his company. They provide operations software for carriers and were exhibit a lot of provisioning and billing solutions. An impressive display.
Santera builds softswitches and gateways. Oddly enough they were displaying the
product like you would a circuit switch – a big box with a lot of services
going into it. In reality it is modular
and really deployed as a distributed system (One distributed “switch” in a
network). They have a few deployments
with small and international carriers, and recently completed new funding. What impressed me about them as well as
about some of the other surviving softswitch companies was that instead of
being portrayed as radical circuit switch killers, this technology is just
being portrayed as normal network infrastructure, and oh by the way it’s got
packets inside instead of circuits.
I went there in search of Jambala, and never found it. They had lots of stuff on multimedia services, but in general a more subdued presence than before.
Cisco’s display was surprisingly modest and low key. 3 lecture areas and a big rack of Cisco products in the center. Hosted solutions was a major theme for them, no surprise there. I didn’t see a lot new. Again, the theme seemed to be that this is routine technology solving business needs. Again, you would never guess the relative market capitalization of anyone at this show from the size and gaudiness of their booths. Cisco did have a large area for display of partner applications. It’s probably not surprising that the OSS/BSS applications dominated that area.
This company had a good sized booth promoting their IP services products. The “IP Services Switch”, capable of doing packet filtering, protocol manipulations, QoS, firewalls, and other functions requiring processing at all levels has clearly become a hot product with lots of companies showing them now. This is still largely a provisioned services market, with nice interfaces used to quickly provision services rather than being controlled in real time from service programs.
I visited here looking for friends and wondering what another company that recently built big new buildings before firing thousands was showing. The answer is mainly cross connect products, their core business.
Tekelek was primarily promoting their core signaling and routing products.
One of the surprising booths I visited was from the ISC, the International Softswitch Consortium. This effort seems to have new life, and a lot of members presenting in their area. They had several white papers available on network architectures for wireless and wireline networks.
Like the ISC, they were off in the periphery and were exhibiting various vendors SIP products. An interesting thing was that they were all networked to eachother and back to at least some of the vendor’s main booths, which created a real-time interoperability experiment.
Jeff Pulver, Carl Ford, and a few others from Pulver were there and as I mentioned threw a party with invites to subscribers to the Pulver Report. Jeff said that the report now has 35,000 subscribers. In general though the mood was subdued. The party was nice, even though the eats and drinks were a bit more modest than some of his others. The band (Herding Cats) was a nice surprise, playing exclusively covers of music mostly from the 70’s and 80’s, which fit the age of the crowd, and doing an excellent job with a wide range of styles.
Unisys had one of the cornier displays, a booth shaped like a giant boat with a guy dressed up as a sea captain “navigating the recovery”. This kind of stuff draws the curious, but I have to wonder whether some of these displays draw customers or not.
I made the rounds of a lot of companies developing and selling softswitches. Sonus, Santera, Syndeo, Sylantro, Telica, and others were all there with good sized booths. There were many small players as well, but not a lot of exuberance. The big players were promoting this as normal technology now, and good for your business. The small ones were quietly handing out literature and probably like the company I am working with talking to the serious customers in a back room.
Iperia, Ubiquity, Pelagro, Pactolis, SS8, and others were there with medium sized booths, promoting their platforms for new applications. Several more, including Personeta, the one I am working with) had modest displays and back rooms for serious customers. Converged applications and JAIN were big. I heard less promotion of Parlay this time but maybe it was bigger in the sessions. Perhaps everyone is suffering from carriers focusing on cost control rather than new revenue.
As always it’s interesting to see who doesn’t show up. Two notables in the field I follow were Dynamicsoft (SIP Servers), and IPVerse/NexVerse. SIP hasn’t gone away, but the absence of a company that has done much to promote it seemed curious. IPVerse (now NexVerse) had been a staple in communications conferences for at least 2 years, but didn’t show here.
I spoke with a lot of people in those 3 days Some of the more interesting tidbits were:
One of the other things I am once again struck by is how small a world the carrier communications business is. Even in a vast show like this you can’t walk down an aisle without running into people you used to work with wearing new badges with new titles.