John Roese’s Blog CTO, Nortel

Location: San Diego, California

After a very crazy week and fighting a cold, I finally find some time to move onto the next segment of the mega-trends dialog with a few discussions on mega-trend #2 - communications-enabled applications.

While the first mega-trend I talked about - hyper-connectivity - has a nice catchy word to associate it with, this second one lacks the “marketing” pizazz and, as such, I beg your indulgence as I try to describe the trend. Maybe in the course of our dialog and your thoughts, we can come up with a better name for this one. At first glance, this trend may not seem as obvious as the first but, in my opinion, is just as significant in terms of changing the telecom and IT industries.

OK, so the name of this trend is “communications-enabled applications”. What does this mean? Well, I put forward that a subtle but real trend going on today is that the very architecture of software and the applications created from that software are being re-invented in a wholesale way.

Yes, programming languages are changing (from C, C++,.. to Java and other new languages) and the interfaces of applications are changing from heavy and discrete to web-based and dynamic. But these changes are being coupled with an even more significant shift that is fundamentally transforming the software and communications worlds of the future.

That shift is the expectation that next-generation applications will be intelligent and fully featured, regardless of the interface used to access them, and that most useful applications will include a communications experience that is seamless to the user and just a natural, transparent part of whatever functionality the application principally provides.

The expectation of the future is also that if you interface with an application, it will not be acceptable if the communications interface is incomplete or segmented in any way that puts the onus on you to piece together a communications experience as part of the total applications experience.

Some early examples of creating a more wholistic communications experience within applications are already happening in simple ways … e.g., the idea of having an email system that also presents your voice mail in the same inbox (nothing new here) or the fact that online gaming systems have added voice communication to the experience and have even taken it to the extent of using spatial voice chat (such as the recent announcement in Second Life).

You can also see this today on some web pages that used to only provide technical support information in text and files but that now have “click to connect” interfaces that allow you to “click” a button to talk to the help desk via that interface. And you can see this in your TiVo or MediaCenter PC, where the television is dependent on Internet communications to provide guides and data to create a richer experience.

Although none of these examples are new concepts, they do provide evidence of a trend that is happening today. The most valuable and interesting applications are those that have the ability to create a richer total experience for you by leveraging the functions and capabilities of the communications network and systems. In fact, it is very hard to find a leading application today, in even a traditional segment, that lacks a shift towards becoming communications-enabled or even communications-dependent.

I hope you agree that this is happening now, but is it a mega-trend? Remember, a mega-trend is a change so profound that it forces a re-invention of foundational elements of the industry. My opinion is that this trend, as it accelerates, is indeed a mega-trend. The reason I believe this is that when one looks at the way to achieve true communications-enabled applications, it becomes obvious that not only do the applications have to evolve or reinvent themselves, but that the network and the way the network and applications interact must be adapted to this trend.

In all of the above examples, the applications only tap into a small part of the capability of the network or, in the worst cases, attempt to recreate the network’s capabilities with “over the top” approaches. The fit between a network that could help the applications create a rich experience and the applications that could understand the network’s capabilities is almost completely out of alignment. In these examples, more often than not, they do not speak the right languages to communicate, they are controlled by different parties who do not trust each other, and, in many cases, they do not even recognize that their interaction could provide value to each other.

In order to achieve a state where the application experience can take full advantage of the capabilities of the network, dramatic changes in architectures and operating models are needed.

Next blog entry in a few days will pick up on this discussion …