PBXs as Mainframes?
Allan Sulkin sent along this link to a NYT article on "survivor technologies," the chief case in point being the mainframe. It's become a stock comparison, at VoiceCon, to liken the PBX to the mainframe--especially since a certain big software company jumped into the market recently. So the question is, is this as bad a thing as it sounds or as it could be? For that matter, is it even true?
The article's author writes:
What are the common traits of survivor technologies? First, it seems, there is a core technology requirement: there must be some enduring advantage in the old technology that is not entirely supplanted by the new. But beyond that, it is the business decisions that matter most: investing to retool the traditional technology, adopting a new business model and nurturing a support network of loyal customers, industry partners and skilled workers.
On that first point, I had a conversation with someone last week at VoiceCon--I forget who it was--where we discussed this very point: Are there advatages in PBXs (whether built on TDM or IP technology) that can't be replicated in a pure software model? The obviously relevant criteria here are reliability and performance: Can the software model deliver these qualities at the same near-perfect level as TDM and, at last, IP PBXs?
The second point is something we heard even more about at VoiceCon. Almost every "legacy" PBX vendor is basically trying to emulate the IBM/mainframe model. I've had extensive conversations with Avaya and Nortel in particular about these companies' attempts to move into the software/services business. I had a chance to meet with Avaya at VoiceCon to talk about their more aggressive push into consulting and services, and I'll be posting about that soon.
I think that Avaya and Nortel get it (as do others that space doesn't let me get into here). As the NYT article suggests, it's all about execution. The Times article deploys a salient quote:
“The mainframe survived its near-death experience and continues to thrive because customers didn’t care about the underlying technology,” said Irving Wladawsky-Berger, who led the technical transformation of the mainframe in the early 1990s and is now a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Customers just wanted the mainframe to do its job at a lower cost, and I.B.M. made the investments to make that happen.”
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