My Mother Uses Skype - Why Bother With Standards?

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A panel discussion from Spring VON 2007 in San Jose, California, exploring the question of the advantages of open standards vs. proprietary software in the world of VoIP deployments. With the runaway success of Skype, members of IMTC and one brave Skype employee ask, why bother with standards?

Moderator: Anatoli Levine - Sr. Director, Software Support and Services, RADVISION
Jonathan Christensen - Sr. Director, Skype
Håkon Dahle - Chief Technologist, TANDBERG
Kfir Pravda - President, Pravda Marketing Services
Peter Saint-Andre - Director of Standards, Jabber Inc.
Shantanu Sarkar - Sr. Manager, Cisco Systems
Chris Steck - Director of Technology Strategy, RealNetworks

Why do we need marketers in standard bodies?

By Kfir Pravda

Ok, I am a marketer. I have engineering background, but I am certainly on the “let’s find the story” side than the “where to plug this router” side. And I can tell you, I think that standardization process needs more marketers around.

So now you ask yourself why, right?

The answer is simple – the current process takes too much time. As such, it makes standards irrelevant from business perspective. We are talking about SIP for ages. Skype has bigger market share. Why? Cause engineers and marketers set together and solved problems based on specific use cases. So, engineers should be happy to have marketers around – not for advice, but in order to sort out all the different issues on the table between companies.

Standards suppose to support services and products. Therefore, they are supposed to be based on some kind of requirements. These requirements should be, in my opinion, based on market needs. And market needs are represented by marketers, not by engineering functions.

So why in most standardization organizations we have almost no representation? Even IMTC, the organization publishing this blog have only one marketer on board (yours truly).

What is your opinion?

Coming soon… IMS or “IMS-ready” – You CAN tell the difference!

By Tsahi Levent-Levi

In my first post on this blog, I started to explain the real difference between real IMS and “IMS-ready” or “IMS-lite”. In the context of SIP, which is what IMS is all about on the client side, this comes down to an exhaustive, daunting list of features. I know, I know... it is not all SIP. You also need IPSec, XCAP and other such curses. Don’t worry, I won’t forget them.

So to be sure I have enough to write about here, and because I feel that we really do need to understand the difference, I’ll be going over this feature list according to subject: compression, security, quality of service, billing, etc.

Because this is going to take some time, I will try to cover one concept in each post – so stay tuned!

I’d like to wish all our Christian readers, a Happy Easter and all our Jewish readers a Happy Passover. And to the rest of you… try not to work too hard while everyone else is celebrating!