Difference between Commercial Open Source and Proprietary - Part 1

In the traditional telecom world we are used to Proprietary software, with a big percentage of this software develop to cater and support a wide spectrum of features and functionalities to please each and every possible user. One issue with such approach is that most users do not actually use a big percentage of the software since they do not need the extra features and functionalities, however they already have paid for it and continue to pay for it. In my own little world this is called a waste of money, why pay for something you don’t use or will never use. Alright most vendors would say they offer integration services on top of the software, but is this not simply charging the customer twice? Just imagine you as a customer you pay for a piece of software and use 10% of its capabilities and to maximize that 10% you will need to buy integration or consulting services which might even be more expensive than the software itself. Should this proprietary software vendors simply develop a piece of software that is actually useful without having to squeeze the customer with high prices? Further to that every user has to pay a license fee, making large scale us of such software in a company very very expensive…

With open source software like Google’s Android, Linux, amanziTel’s Wireless Explorer the core platform is open source and free. This means that users do not have to pay for the core software, and being open source customers can develop their own applications or buy it somewhere else. With such flexibility and freedom is it not better for every customer? The answer of course lies within the customer’s strategies, principles and way of working. If they aim to minimize the cost spent in software then they should look for a solution where the total cost of ownership is lowest. The question is how do you as a user or customer calculate the total cost of ownership?

In pursuit of the future in network operations

Two years ago when we launched AmanziTel we wrote a simple website that communicates the vision of our products, solutions and services. After a year we found that bigger players in the market started to copy the concept and market it. Does that mean that we have accurately predicted the type of solutions required by network operators today or are we simply listening to the customers? Do we truly believe that our ideas were ground breaking and worth copying by others? The truth is we simply listened to our customers and added bits and pieces of our own innovations. And we misled the competition....

Two years on we are about to launch a new website that will communicate our current solutions, products and services. It will show our ideas and what we have achieved… This in itself what it is today and not the future. The future solutions are currently being developed and we will not make the description of the solution publicly marketed until we actually have another hundreds of networks using it. If you are part of the 140 networks using or trying our current solution, everything in the new website is old since we most likely have presented it to you already or you are already using it.

So today we can correlate multiple data sources from the network on a multi-vendor and multi-technology environment and not only that we can correlate business intelligence with actual network operations giving an end-to-end view of the business lifecycle. We can also locate all mobiles in the network to an accuracy of 3 meters, further to that we can enable operators to use all mobiles in the network report their individual performance measurement and subscriber preferences much like any business analytics do today. We also automate the process of optimizing the network and protecting the network from any threats or vulnerabilities.

Having said that what are we going to release in the future? Well like we did in the past 2 years it is something we communicate directly to customers on our presentations and meetings and not something you will be able to read on our website… Is this strategy future proof? Only time will tell……

Inventing the Future...

With so much time spent flying between Europe and Asia and being having to accept bad airline service since I didn’t have a choice, I somehow manage to thinker and contemplate on how can we as individuals or organizations predict future technologies. Of course it is fair to say that predicting the correct technology in the future for a particular application or service is very very hard… and in this case only a few manage and become very very rich… Now I know of a man called James Martin, considered by many as the father of modern IT having been responsible for the “outbreak” of information engineering and have accurately picked technologies in his future. If we can only do that we can perhaps anticipate the next big thing… The question is how? Is there a method to the madness? Is it an art? Or is it pure luck?

We have seen a handful few in our lifetime achieve such a feat, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are shining examples so as a few others. How do we emulate them? It is a gift? A skill that we learn or a knowledge that we adopt? Or is it a product of our own creativity and in some cases a moment of insanity?

Is there anyone out there who can give a single clue on how to invent the future, without having to charge a huge amount of money for doing so? There are a few people that lays claim to such talent but then again they want you to pay for their insight whether it is buying a book or paying huge consulting fees, which by the most large companies do.