Network convergence will be driven to its next level by the profit potential of high-value applications, not by network cost reduction. So said Intel Vice President and Dialogic President Howard Bubb in his keynote speech at this months Computer Telephony Expo in Los Angeles.
“If you just tie things together with gateways,” Bubb told his listeners, “you might save some money on infrastructure, but you dont get breakthroughs in the services you can provide. Without integration, each piece becomes a commodity; in the integration lies the value.”
Bubb compared the emerging platform of the unified voice/data/video packet network with the familiar platform of the Wintel personal computer. “Intel and Microsoft enabled the explosion of demand for personal computing,” he said, “but application developers created that demand by innovation on that standard platform. The next-generation network will be applications-driven.”