Transcript:

Host: Catherine Girardeau – PodTech
Guest: Bill McCarthy – Cisco Systems

Catherine Girardeau – PodTech
From the World Center Marriott in Orlando, Florida this is PodTech.net.

Bill McCarthy is Operations Director with Cisco Systems managing field service providers. Bill talked with PodTech.net about opportunities and challenges for the new Competitive Local Exchange Careers.

Bill McCarthy – Cisco Systems
When we think of emerging providers, our definition would be CLECs’ new greenfield opportunities like a bondage a couple of years ago. But, we also work with ISPs, we work with the Euroflings (Inaudible), but lot of folks here are trying to figure out the riddle in terms of translating the competitive business and this is something that’s profitable today.

Catherine Girardeau – PodTech
So, tell me a little bit more about Cisco’s role in the current climate, about what’s going on with CLECs?

Bill McCarthy – Cisco Systems
Well, traditionally we’ve been involved with the core and the edge built out over the CLECs infrastructure. We’ve also been very interested historically in capturing CPE, so if they’re adding customer from the insurance perspective and there is a piece of Cisco equipment attached to that. A lot of design work consultation on how to build out the infrastructure. As we go forward, and this is a lot of what we spoke about this morning is, the ability to create new services to deliver over that infrastructure is becoming more and more important, because I think many of the CLECs are struggling with, how do we become more profitable, more effective in reaching our end users with relevant services. So, our efforts have moved from simply providing infrastructure now to move into efforts from service creation, understand the market, understand what’s available, I am trying to build those next solutions with our customer base.

Catherine Girardeau – PodTech
I would think that would involve some pretty significant business partnerships or collaborations. How is Cisco collaborating with MetaSwitch?

Bill McCarthy – Cisco Systems
MetaSwitch has filled a good product yet for us. Our partnership with MetaSwitch initially was geared towards how do we go and approach CLECs with business customers and residential. John and I actually worked on the first couple of projects together, John Lazar who is the CEO of MetaSwitch and they’ve been very successful in the market in the United States, especially with the emerging providers and they’ve also been a wonderful partner for us and they help facilitate building — if somebody is going to make the transition of Voice over IP, they also have to make an investment in IP infrastructure. So, from our perspective that’s very natural on a very healthy match.

Catherine Girardeau – PodTech
Finally, where’s this going? What are the regulatory changes or deregulation changes that’ll change the business climate for Cisco?

Bill McCarthy – Cisco Systems
Yes, that might be the $20,000 question. If somebody said to me where do I think the pendulum is right now, it probably favors a larger providers. They’ve CC changes of last 12-24 months; they’ really probably favored the larger service providers. That seems in my view to go in seasons. The larger providers are innovating well today, some of the larger incumbents, I mean they are some new things, IPT wheels driving — in my opinion, is forcing them to make investments, so they historically haven’t had to make, it’s forcing them to change their back-offices, it’s forcing them to try to go out and compete with Cable which is very difficult. The CLEC market has to respond to that same competitive environment, because users want a lot of the same things. Users want more and more rich content, they want applications, they want them quickly. So, in our opinion, in the CLEC market the game is really going to be about speed. How quickly can you profitably modify your business model so that you can go and hang in there with the ILECs, compete with the Cable companies but also create some things that give you differentiation in the market place, so that you can continue to make money not only with that thrive. Certainly some folks are going to fall by the wayside, there are others that are very — they are very efficient in invading and we are going to see those individuals continue to have success, those individual companies have success.

Catherine Girardeau – PodTech
Bill McCarthy is an Operations Director with Cisco Systems, this is PodTech.net.

Copyright ©2006 PodTech.net. All rights reserved. Privacy policy

Tags: Bill McCarthy, MetaSwitch, Cisco

Transcript:

Host: Catherine Girardeau - PodTech
Guest: Gary Kim - IT Business Wire
Guest: Andy Randall - MetaSwitch

Catherine Girardeau - PodTech
This is PodTech.net. Gary Kim is Editor-in-Chief of IT Business and Andy Randall, VP of Marketing at MetaSwitch, join PodTech.net in conversation with Andy Randall and Gary Kim at a breakfast panel sponsored by MetaSwitch at the World Center Marriott in Orlando, Florida.

What we are going to focus this discussion around is what it means to be a service provider in the current climate for CLECs?

Andy Randall - MetaSwitch
I think it’s a really interesting time for service providers that you see the rise of Google, YouTube, all of these Internet based applications and service providers are really juggling within this to try and work out what is it that they are actually providing. Is the application that they are providing transport access to the Internet at large or can they really move up the value chain in terms of services? I think for lot of carriers they are finding it struggle to actually work out where they are on that ladder and even though they want to move up, it is a very different mindset and it becomes a different kind of challenge for them to build, build the applications and it’s all about how fast they can move. I think that’s the large part of it. Carrier tends to think in terms of years and Google thinks in terms of days or weeks. What do you think Gary?

Gary Kim - IT Business Wire
Another way to explain what Andy just said is that something really good or something really bad could happen to the entire global telecom industry, which is about a trillion dollars a year, in annual revenue. So, the really good thing would be that we succeed in creating applications that are like voice on your mobile phone or voice on your PBX at the office, or voice at your home phone, you get paid for providing that application. The really bad thing that could happen is we windup being just providers at the pipes that allow those things to be created. Those things get created by other parties that are not affiliated with you a business sense and you don’t capture much of the revenue from it. So, it’s a huge challenge, it faces all service providers not just the CLECs and it’s an issue we’re going to be facing for the rest of our professional career, that’s very clear.

Catherine Girardeau - PodTech
One of the things that came up in panel discussion had to do with differentiation or convergence between services for home use, mobile use and enterprise use. What are the challenges for service providers with regard to this kind of convergence?

Andy Randall - MetaSwitch
I think those are distinct areas of applications right now. I think the big difference we are seeing at the movement is in terms of video applications. The residential subscribers — the activity that’s happening there is all about video on demands, IPTV and the Internet based video sites. You’re seeing the content creators putting their shows up on the Websites for download. Now, this is completely disintermediating the whole distribution setup is being put in place over the last 75 years. That’s the huge shift in terms of the residential space. Different kind of dynamics happening in the business space, that where that overlap, this happening and this came up in the panel discussion and I think this is really important. I don’t think people are paying enough attention to this is that, the home workers and home office and the mobility of the worker to go beyond their cubicle to mobile space and into there home. I think the service providers that can really capture this dynamic both addressing all of those residential requirements and tie that back into the office environment, that for me could be a killer app, for any kind of service provider.

Gary Kim - IT Business Wire
One of the great inversions we might be seeing and I could be quite wrong about this, is that traditionally the really interesting things human beings can do with communications, start in the business sector, get use there, people get familiar with it and then start they using them at home, fax machines, best example then. What we have seen I think in the last couple of decades though is that the fax machine was about the last technology that actually originated in the office, so much brought home, I think everything else one can make an argument.

Catherine Girardeau - PodTech
Or email, well email.

Gary Kim - IT Business Wire
Sure, it starts in the home and then at some point so many people are using it the enterprise has to respond. I would argue to a certain extent broadband access itself, email, instant messaging, blogs, wiki’s, the use of Internet – open internet right, all of that was created by demand of users that found these things useful and then now the IT departments of the enterprises have to respond and that’s a pretty big shift. I think all of this in that the service provider community need to spend more time looking at how consumers use technologies because those things are going to wind up in our offices, there’s no question about that.

Catherine Girardeau - PodTech
And this is kind of where managed services comes in, especially maybe for small to mid size business, they don’t have the in-house expertise in their IT departments, nor perhaps the person power to deal with the IT demand of this rapidly changing environment.

Andy Randall - MetaSwitch
I was at the trade show the yesterday I was just talking to some customers who — I am talking to how they handle this kind of situation of particularly the kind of things David was talking about with quality of service, but not just in terms of the last mile to the enterprise, but actually going and replacing their network infrastructure, managing the local area network remotely over that wide area network and that’s I think even see more of that where service providers, point to demarkation of the service providers changing from where the T1 goes into the office building, right down to the desktop and they are taking on more of the management if it uses desktop of the network infrastructure and the entire IT applications of the small — particularly small business obviously at a point.

Gary Kim - IT Business Wire
One of the ways to illustrate what Andy is saying I think is that just as people customizes their cell phones by ringtones, we maybe moving towards world and hopefully we are, where end users can actually create their own custom applications, that maybe actually useable just by them personally at the office and it could be that Tom in the cubical next to me doesn’t want to do this, he may create entirely different applications and that’s just a fundamental shift in a way that we have always operated. Always before it’s been — we service providers will decide what you need, package it up, create it and sell it to you and now we maybe opening up our networks a little bit more and with that allows people to create the things that they decide they want without us having to intervene in the middle of it, which is a certainly great thing.

Andy Randall - MetaSwitch
This is the most profound time of challenge that I have ever discovered in all my years, being in the business and it’s a time of great opportunity, not just great risk, I mean both of them are present to you, but both of them are addressed.

Gary Kim - IT Business Wire
I think it’s all about carriers realizing that business model is changing. We could not to see a change in technologies, but also change in people are getting the services from based upon which of the carriers that are embracing those can build these today.

Catherine Girardeau - PodTech
Andy Randall of MetaSwitch and Gary Kim of IT Business, thank you so much for joining me on PodTech.net.

Gary Kim is Editor-in-Chief of IT Business and Andy Randall, VP of Marketing at MetaSwitch, at the World Center Marriott in Orlando, Florida, this is PodTech.net.

Copyright ©2006 PodTech.net. All rights reserved. Privacy policy

Tags: Gary Kim, Andy Randall, MetaSwitch, CLECs

Transcript:
Host: Catherine Girardeau - PodTech
Guest: Chris Mairs - MetaSwitch
Guest: Andy Randall - MetaSwitch

Catherine Girardeau - PodTech
PodTech.net brings you a conversation with MetaSwitch’s Chris Mairs, he is the CTO and Senior Vice President of Business Development, and with Andy Randall, Vice President of Marketing. They’ll discuss the partnership between Cisco and MetaSwitch, the definition of service in Next Generation Networks and the challenges CLECs face in the 21st century IT climate.

Chris Mairs - MetaSwitch
So, I’m Chris Mairs, I’m the MetaSwitch CTO and I’m also the Senior VP for Business Development.

Catherine Girardeau - PodTech
Welcome to the Podcast.

Chris Mairs - MetaSwitch
Thank you.

Andy Randall - MetaSwitch
I’m Andy Randall, VP of Marketing, MetaSwitch.

Catherine Girardeau - PodTech
So, thanks for being here. We’re here at the Marriott in Orlando, kind of a side event to COMPTEL. There was just a breakfast put on by MetaSwitch for some of your customers and business partners. I wanted to talk to you Chris, if you could start with your CTO hat on, to talk about some of the challenges CLECs are facing and kind of the technological challenges, how to develop a 21st century platform as an equipment vendor?

Chris Mairs - MetaSwitch
So, CLECs will always be in the position of needing to innovate and differentiate themselves from the incumbents. The incumbent has the huge advantage of owning the customer base, and the CLECs often moving into a — moving it in a competitive way to take customers away. So, what we need to do is be able to offer innovative services and different service bundles where the customer maybe says, well, the telephone service I get from my incumbent provider is all right, so I’m fine with that, but hey, if I can get that in a single pricing bundle with video as well under some unique data services, then I’m prepared to move in order to take the bundle. Similarly, the CLEC may be able to pick up on a new trend, a social trend, a classic example historically would have been something like text messaging, another one that’s reasonably hot at the moment is presence or custom ring-back, all these new services that come along.

The key is that the CLEC needs to be able to deliver that more quickly than the incumbent in order to be able to move in. So, they need an architecture where they can slot in new services quickly and those services may come from different vendors, so they’ve got services coming from multiple different vendors on different application server platforms. One of the keys here is an architecture such as IMS, and MetaSwitch has for the past two years already had some of the infrastructure in place, it allows those application service to be slotted in, which allows for quick delivery of new services. The key then is how do you blend all that in such a way that the experience for the user is seamless, they don’t need to see that all the different applications are coming from different vendors, and the billing infrastructure is correct, and the operational infrastructure is correct, so that CLEC can actually make money from that. There’s a lot of nuts and bolts in the architecture of the network, and specifically in the architecture of the switch to allow appropriate records to be flown out at the right time and then consolidate back together again, and all the subscriber information to be held in a single repository, which is called the HSS, the Home Subscriber Server, and from there all the different application servers can pull out data relating to a subscriber and offer a joint up solution.

Catherine Girardeau - PodTech
Chris, I’ve question from that. The way you’re presenting, which appears right, is that the CLECs need to be more nimble, need to be faster than the incumbents, and we see IMS has an architecture to enable this, and that all make sense, but then when you look at the headlines, it’s the incumbents who are all making the noise about the move to IMS, and the ones that are embracing this architecture. Do you see a conflict there, what’s really happening in terms of who is adopting IMS and what people are doing with advance services?

Chris Mairs - MetaSwitch
Okay, interesting question. So, if you look at the very big guys, the AT&Ts of this world, then what’s driving them to IMS is a need to replace a very, very, very complex and monolithic network infrastructure with a new architecture, and they’ve settled on IMS as being the right architecture. They are throwing literally billions of dollars at that sort of network replacement, and they need a strong architecture to do that with, and IMS is the best blueprint around to do that with.

For the smaller guys — and IMS may not want to take it in its absolutely purest form and take every single piece and decompose the network to the ultimate level. Nonetheless, it has some very clear differentiation of the network into the control plane transport and the application server planes, and buy that separation out into different plane, that smaller guys can leverage the IMS architecture to give them a better service delivery platform.

Catherine Girardeau - PodTech
You kind of discussed the definition of service for a Next Generation Networks in that last question, is there more to say about that?

Chris Mairs – MetaSwitch
You can’t just deliver plain old voice anymore, you’ve got to be able to deliver new services and you won’t know what those services are today, and certainly you won’t know what services people are prepared to pay for. A classic example would be ringtones on mobile phones. Today, many youngsters expect to be able to download a whole track of music for free, but equally they’ll pay $0.99 or $1.99 for a ringtone on their mobile phone, which is only a small clip of that same track, so how does that work? I don’t understand it, but people do that, and so as a service provider you don’t necessarily — you’re never going to be able to rationalize or prejudge what’s going to happen, but when a phenomenon does happen, you need to be able to make the most of it and make money from it.

Andy Randall - MetaSwitch
I think that points to one of the key things about service delivery is, it’s not just about being able to do these things, it’s about the granularity with which you can build for them as well, and yeah, some things are going to go to bundles, where people pay a monthly subscription fee, another area, it’s moving very much towards having a lot of small cheap transactions, that’s why iTunes does so well selling all these songs at $0.99 each. If a service provider can move into that model, where people in some sense get some kind of service for — a small fee at a time than that’s very much going with the direction that certainly the younger generation are expecting to be able to get access to it.

Chris Mairs - MetaSwitch
So, a good example of that might be, as a residential user, the parents might setup a teen line service, where you have a separate facility on your home phone where if a call comes in for your teenager, it rings to a different — it’s a different number associated with the home phone, and you get a different ringtone for it, and that’s for your teenage kid. Now, what you might want to do is have a package bundle where the teenager gets $10 a month which they can spend either on calls or on text messages or on ringtones, and the single bundle there and the teenager makes the choice. The parent of course is safe, because they’ve partitioned the bundle to $10 a month, but the teenager gets to spend the money on what they want to spend it on.

Andy Randall - MetaSwitch
Most billing systems today wouldn’t be able to let you do that, most carriers can’t deliver that kind of service yet because the billing systems aren’t there and the backend infrastructure isn’t there, so I think that’s what we’re getting to.

Chris Mairs - MetaSwitch
That’s right, so it’s not just the underline protocols which IMS is so heavy on, it’s some of the more sort of prosaic back office stuff like the billing systems which have to be changed to make them much more granular.

Catherine Girardeau - PodTech
As Senior VP of Business Development, you mange overall MetaSwitch’s partnership with Cisco Systems, can you tell me a little bit more about what MetaSwitch is doing with Cisco?

Chris Mairs - MetaSwitch
Sure. So, our relationship with Cisco is primarily a sales partnership. So, both our sales forces are joined up and make joint calls on customers, where we can offer a combination of Cisco equipment, MetaSwitch equipment and possibly professional services from either organization to deliver a total solution. We also have close relationships with Cisco’s product management teams for their various equipment, their routers, their IAD’s, their phones, and through our combination of product management relationships and sales relationships, we can actually deliver effective solutions in the CLECs space, but also in the rural IOC space, and also in cable, we’ve just recently announced a relationship with Cisco in the cable space.

Andy Randall - MetaSwitch
I can talk about that a bit maybe from the customer perspective. I think what we see when we do go out to customers and talk to them about Cisco relationships and do these joint calls with the Cisco team is that, they very much look to Cisco as the incumbent vendor, as the dominant vendor for Next Generation Networking infrastructure. So, lot of our customers, they’re not just making a decision about putting in a soft switch, they’re making a decision about changing their network completely, migrating their network to a Next Gen Core. So, those decisions are very tightly tied together in terms of how do we upgrade our network infrastructure and how do we deliver applications and services on top of that. So, the fact we have that partnership, really enables them to take a holistic view of what they’re trying to do and also obviously makes them feel good about MetaSwitch in that, we’re taking that view that we have to go beyond just the soft switch to make sure that their whole network implementation works. That’s a key driver behind the partnership with Cisco is, to make sure that we’re not just delivering a switching platform, but we work with the routers, with the switches, with the customer premise equipment, Cisco’s very dominant end, for example, IP phones, the world’s largest supplier of IP phones, so that we see very good feedback from the customers about how that relationship’s working.

Chris Mairs - MetaSwitch
Just adding a little bit to what Andy was saying about the technical challenges over Voice over IP network. We have a very distributed switch architecture, where we separate out the media gateway from the call agent and we have redundant call agents, and that’s all great, but if the underlying IP network doesn’t have the appropriate characteristics in terms of latency, jitter and redundant paths, and it’s very complex building a totally redundant IP network. If that infrastructure isn’t there, then whatever we do in a switch is worth nothing, so that’s why our relationship with Cisco is important for us.

Catherine Girardeau - PodTech
Chris Mairs, CTO and SVP of Business Development for MetaSwitch.

Chris Mairs - MetaSwitch
Thank you.

Catherine Girardeau - PodTech
Andy Randall, VP of Marketing for MetaSwitch, thanks so much. At the World Center Marriott in Orlando, Florida, this is PodTech.net.

Copyright ©2006 PodTech.net. All rights reserved. Privacy policy

Tags: MetaSwitch, Chris Mairs, Andy Randall, Cisco

Click here for transcript.

Tags: CLEC, competitive local exchange carriers, MetaSwitch, John Lazar, Cisco, Bill McCarthy, Remi Communications, David Malfara, Rich Williams, Connect2 Communication, PodTech.net

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