Application Interoperability…Why does it matter?
Hmm, let’s see…I have been in this business long enough to remember that cell phones did not used to work everywhere. Does anybody else remember the mid 80s when roaming was almost impossible and cost more than your monthly service? Dating myself too much?…OK then do you remember the 90s in the US when you could only text to folks who used the same carrier that you were using? Remember sitting around in our telecom, not-so-ivory towers and asking why SMS was growing like wildfire in Europe and Asia?…Hmmm…They had interoperability from the outset.
Interoperability comes in many forms. And, while we in the telecom sector love to deal with complex systems, the reality is that the more interoperable systems or applications become, the broader their adoption will be. Let’s face it, we all want to see broader adoption of the services and applications we create. Another example we use sometimes to help folks get their head around this is the tower industry in wireless. Carriers used to believe that they were going to differentiate with coverage. Eventually, they all realized that coverage was table stakes, local land use regulators would not stand for site proliferation and the tower sharing industry soared to new heights.
Often, the hardest thing for us to do is give up control. However, I believe that the Internet has taught us that when we give up control, we see innovation soar. We have to change the way we think - we have to realize that when we open up networks and open up applications and services - we are inviting an entirely new group of innovators to look at our products and help us take them to new levels of functionality. All this “opening up” is just another way of saying we need application interoperability.
We also are living in a time when innovation is happening at an unprecedented pace. 24 months ago social networking was something college kids were “tinkering around with.” Today it is mainstream. In fact, we have seen numerous social networking sites reinvent themselves at least once already. The “next big thing” is often only weeks away, not years; and our ability to anticipate what will come next is getting more challenging. Be honest with yourself, if someone had told you 24 months ago that allowing SMS to interoperate with a blog site (application interoperability) would be insanely popular and that a company with no documented business model would be worth $500M or more - what would your reaction have been?
Application interoperability is all around us. Social networking popularity is making this table stakes with the likes of LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace and they are networking amongst themselves - in fact Facebook and Twitter are now linked - Twitter can update your Facebook account. Instant Messaging companies are integrating social networking; and some are even starting to allow interoperability of their messaging clients. At 4DK Technologies, Inc. we believe that any and all interoperability can and should be possible. We should not be constrained by application or service boundaries - we should just make things work, as simply and easily as possible for the end user.
4DK is thrilled to be a pioneering partner in the ng Connect Program kicked off by Alcatel-Lucent. This program represents exactly the new kind of thinking required to launch innovative, highly interoperable service offerings that will showcase the capabilities of the next generation of wireless technologies.
