One of the stumbling blocks of the traditional telecommunications industry has been its apparent refusal to cooperate with itself. The big telecommunications giants have all been around for over a hundred years. The concept of closed, proprietary systems is so ingrained in their culture that even their attempts at standards compliancy are tainted by their desire to get the jump on the competition, by adding that one feature that no one else supports. For an example of this thinking, one simply has to look at the VoIP products being offered by the telecom industry today. While they claim standards compliance, the thought that you would actually expect to be able to connect a Cisco phone to a Nortel switch, or that an Avaya voicemail system could be integrated via IP to a Siemens PBX, is not one that bears discussing. In the computer industry, things are different. Twenty years ago, if you bought an IBM server, you needed an IBM network and IBM terminals to talk to it. Now, that IBM server is likely to interconnect to Dell terminals though a Cisco network (and run Linux, of all things). Anyone can easily think of thousands of variations on this theme. If any |
telephony