 | Issue: | Asia-Pacific I 2008 |
| Article no.: | 14 | |
| Topic: | The future of hosted unified communications | |
| Author: | Brian Beutler | |
| Title: | Founder & CEO | |
| Organisation: | Alianza Global Communication Services | |
| PDF size: | 223KB |
About author
Brian Beutler is the CEO and Founder of Alianza Global Communication Services. Prior to Alianza, Mr Beutler was the Vice President of Sales and Marketing, and subsequently President, of BeeLine Long Distance, a long distance carrier located in Orem, Utah with clients across the USA. The Utah Technology Council named Mr Beutler the 2005 Emerging CXO of the Year and his company was listed among the top 25 fastest-growing companies in Utah during both 2005 and 2006. Mr Beutler attended Brigham Young University, where he continues to lecture on the subjects of entrepreneurship and E-Business.
Article abstract
There have been significant events throughout history, which have changed the way we communicate and jumpstarted periods of increased understanding. From the alphabet and the Rosetta Stone, to Gutenberg’s press and Bell’s telephone, each of these advances has improved our ability to communicate with one another, to share knowledge and to preserve it for generations to come. Each successive advance has made communication simpler and easier. Communication, especially to a large audience, has traditionally been a complicated matter. This complexity meant that only an elect few – the scribes, scholars and storytellers – participated intensively in the mystical art of information exchange. It wasn’t until the invention of the printing press, and the ensuing explosion of literacy, that the ability to communicate en masse became a practical matter for the rest of the population.
Full Article
There have been significant events throughout history, which have changed the way we communicate and jumpstarted periods of increased understanding. From the alphabet and the Rosetta Stone, to Gutenberg’s press and Bell’s telephone, each of these advances has improved our ability to communicate with one another, to share knowledge and to preserve it for generations to come. Each successive advance has made communication simpler and easier. Communication, especially to a large audience, has traditionally been a complicated matter. This complexity meant that only an elect few – the scribes, scholars and storytellers – participated intensively in the mystical art of information exchange. It wasn’t until the invention of the printing press, and the ensuing explosion of literacy, that the ability to communicate en masse became a practical matter for the rest of the population. The Internet revolution Fast forward 500 years and we find ourselves in the midst of another world-changing revolution, this time, led by a host of new technologies enabled through Internet Protocol (IP). The Internet is the single greatest tool the world has ever known for the democratization of information. At no other time in the history of our species has knowledge been so easily and quickly shared, stored and preserved. Using simple software publishing tools, freely available online, any person can create and publish content to a global audience without the old constraints of cost, technical know-how or complex distribution. Today, there are an estimated five million terabytes of information authored, accessed and shared by an approximate one billion Internet users. This enormous body of knowledge is stored on about 17 billion web pages scattered among almost 200 million web hosts. This immense growth is encouraged not only by the simplicity of use, but also by the relatively low cost of getting online and becoming productive. Broadband and convergence What sets the Internet apart from the many other significant milestones is its versatility as a platform and its ability to bring together different forms of communication. The IP-enabled network of today carries a variety of information. Through digital abstraction enabled by IP, the same network can transmit any sort of information, from text and photographs to voice to video, allowing instantaneous, media-rich communications from nearly anywhere on the planet. Enterprises use the convergence of networks – previously separated by the type or format of the information carried – that digitalisation makes possible to increase the productivity of their workforce. Video conferencing, for example, used to be an expensive endeavour requiring specialised broadcast equipment. Now, many personal computers sold today have basic video conferencing hardware built in as standard and the software is either bundled or easily available, for free, on the Internet. The Internet has also changed how we use the trusty telephone. IP has driven down the prices of telephony and has hastened the development and spread of innovative services and products in telecommunications, media, electronics and retailing. Carrier-grade Voice over Internet Protocol, VoIP, has been used to carry international voice traffic for a number of years, while consumer VoIP services are expected to serve nearly 200 million users by 2010. If IP is responsible for making these advances possible, then the success of IP-enabled communication can be attributed to the rise of broadband. Over the past decade, high-speed Internet connections have increased exponentially, while broadband prices, once pegged to traffic volume, have fallen to near dial-up levels. In mature Internet markets like the US and parts of Europe, broadband subscribers tip the scales at nearly 70 per cent of web-surfing households. Many developing countries are also catching up, with DSL (digital subscriber line) growth in China quickly overtaking the US. The quality of service of IP-based communications has improved considerably given the constant improvement of the worldwide broadband infrastructure. Distinguishing between analogue telephone connections and VoIP today is often hard to do. While streaming high-resolution video can still be a challenge under some conditions, faster, fatter pipes and better compression technology will overcome these problems as the technology matures. Combined with broadband’s falling prices, the narrowing gap in quality has driven mass adoption of broadband services. Once the playground of large corporations, smaller businesses are now enjoying the efficiency and competitive advantage of these technologies. Worldwide collaboration The world is getting smaller. As IP-based technologies develop and mature, our ability to make meaningful connections between individuals and groups, regardless of physical distance, is increasing. Before the Internet, such practical barriers as time and distance limited mass cooperation. Organising and coordinating large-scale projects between hundreds or thousands of people around the globe was nearly impossible. The Internet’s ability to eliminate the constraints of space and time has spawned some of the largest collaborative projects in the world. The Wikipedia, a living encyclopaedia that anyone can contribute their knowledge, experience and opinions to on nearly any subject, is one such project. The Berkley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing is enabling a number of collaborative projects, such as SETI@home – these projects, by using the Internet to amass the excess capacity available on a great number of home computers, are able to inexpensively take advantage of computing power that rivals that of the most massive supercomputers. The Internet has become much more than a substitute for forms of communication that we are familiar with – it is enabling entirely new methods of communication and collaboration. Software-as-a-Service Economist Lee W. McKnight used the analogy of waves to describe technological advancement, in which “new waves destroy older ones, only to be devoured by a newer, more efficient one”. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is one of these new ‘waves’. With SaaS, the hardware and software – the ‘intelligence’ that provides a service function – is taken from the end user’s device and is hosted, instead, on a carrier or enterprise server. By using broadband to deliver services to the end-user, it becomes possible for almost anyone to take advantage – at a fraction of the cost, and without the need to own the systems involved – of services that previously only large enterprises could afford to buy. In practice, SaaS is similar to the established business practice of outsourcing. SaaS allows companies to focus on their core competency, instead of worrying about the availability of resources, technical experience or maintenance. The SaaS wave also means function is increasingly abstracted from both the physical infrastructure and the software that provides it; as a result, smaller, more feature-packed devices that afford greater mobility, can now access a wide variety of highly sophisticated services. WiMAX holds the key to the next big wave. More cost effective than laying cable, and with the potential to deliver reliable high-speed access to mobile devices, WiMAX will be able to provide the level of mobility required to realise the full potential of SaaS. With all these tools at our disposal, humanity is poised to enter a new era of ever more personal communication and higher levels of productivity and efficiency. The future is calling, but it’s comforting to know that we can still engage in mankind’s oldest form of communication – speak with one another no matter where we are – with just a few presses of a button, or clicks of a mouse.
