A couple months ago I spent an hour with a freelance writer doing a piece on VoIP for IT Business, a Canadian IT trade media outlet. I just got notice that the piece did publish in March, and you can read it here. Warning, the online formatting is slightly messed up. My comments are a good two pages down, under the heading Radical Shift.
What I find interesting reading the article is that different people coming at the same topic have such different opinions. For instance, I state the view (widely held) that data networking skills are much more important that telco knowledge to a VoIP deployment. This certainly has been the case in VoIP implementations I’ve been involved with. It’s all routers, firewalls, tcp/udp ports, traffic shaping, VPNs, and the like. The voice part kind of just happened when the other stuff was done right.
But, Roberta Fox, analyst of the Fox Group, states that “folks that are providers of datacom services, they need to embrace this space sooner rather than later, because if they don’t do it, the telecom dealers will develop the data skills and they will take the market from them”. Hmm, I haven’t observed telecom people to be particularly quick at moving at anything. And, it seems to be that datacom people have already embraced this space, from the equipment suppliers to the integrators to the inhouse IT departments. But, maybe I’m too far out in front?
Patrick Powers, the last interviewee from an VAR called OAM group, says that VARs looking at VoIP need to be telco experts, and most of them aren’t. Uhh, gee, no. That’s the point of IP communications. You don’t need to know wink signaling from BZ8, or how many bearer channels an E1 circuit has.
Interesting, how the different lenses we bring affect how we view an issue.