Face of technology
This is more or less a very objective discussion on technology in general. Looking back in the early stages of IT, forums were the way to bring in new ideas and open discussions on technology strategies. I attempt to participate in a variety of discussion in order to stay afloat in my profession in order to have knowledge as to what the future holds as far as technology is concerned. It is very difficult to follow at this stage. And the need to focus on active participants from the consumer industry is needed.
Technology companies are the only companies that still utilize R&D budgets today. There are no more companies with desire to pay groups to provide solutions for business needs as far as technology goes now. This has hurt the playing field in many ways. Costs have been reduced. Solutions picked on basis of convenience and technology is driven by those who are profit driven. And have you seen requirements for CTO’s nowadays? The requirements are no longer for elite technical professionals, they are for business driven executives with a little bit of tech on the side. Where is the career path going for technical folks?
This is where participation comes into play. Consumers should run the world, not technology companies. The flow should focus on business needs. R&D groups should be formed in hopes to provide custom based needs for corporations. Technology needs that are out of scope and out of budget should be outsourced for a vendor supplied solution.
Supporting Example:
Having eyes in both areas provides me with more insight than most people have. For starters, network monitoring solutions. Most vendors that claim that their solution is the best are fooling only those who are too lazy to invest time to see what they actually want. Any solution should begin with need and followed by how we can achieve this. Most commonly in today’s workplace it is followed by how can we “obtain” this? And you will go on a bender putting two or three solutions together and achieve nothing but higher operational costs. “All” management tools can be created in house with local tools. That’s right, all, in fact if companies sat down and provided resources for excellent R&D they could save allot of money on operational costs and the purchase of commercial solutions.
In most telecommunication companies, in house development of management tools has always been a necessity. New equipment arrives onsite and vendors participate with the consumer in developing the best API’s or MIB management interfaces so that the company is provided everything they need to manage.
Now this is just one example and one area where this model can be helped. However, all areas can be helped by this and this is why forums were developed in the first place. To assist the consumer base, and not to assist the commercial market in developing new solutions. Companies settle for solutions. Enterprise Security and VOIP have been bottle up into solutions and provided to consumers who take on the operational support costs and not fully understand if this solution is what they are actually looking for or does the name solve their last assessment.
If I had the time I would put together a forum. As you can tell from the site, the professor gets busy. However, to fix the open community I would make time. I would like to take all small business into a forum and assist in providing solutions that may or may not include those that necessarily cost money. Develop security solutions that do not require a huge support contract in order to maintain. Help take open source VOIP to provide telephony at cost verses one size fits all solutions that are overkill.
And next provide forums that comment on technology and participate on a consumer level and not a vendor level.
For example:
In parallel to what is being developed in the mobile ip community, there is a protocol being written to provide mobility using IPv4 and can be used in conjunction with VOIP and mobility platforms. This protocol is called HIP. (Host Identity Protocol). The HIP protocol works in conjunction with dns and public keys to keep host identity intact for hosts. Consumer feedback would enable development for enterprise solutions as well as carrier solutions. You can all see how it applies to carrier based solutions, but in the enterprise, how cool would it be to have users that are quite mobile and still have access to resources provided by their own company. This is just one application, but it would be secure (certificate based) can survive without the need of a vpn tunnel.
You could carve out a bunch of need for this technology. In order to do so, we need to change how we participate. Lets not wait until it becomes relevant and then put in a feature request. Let’s mold it relevancy at its infantry.