Archive
The Dinovator Movement is better than the Bitpipe Accelerator Den…
Summary: Help companies with dinosaur IT systems survive the ice age of innovation. Become a Dinovator…
Before reading this blog post, you should have read: how the cheapest X86 became the smartest switch on MWC, how the cheapest X86 can solve the 4 biggest telecom industry problems and the telco innovator’s den.
If you thought that we were waiting by the phone to get calls from telecom CEOs for the telco innovator’s den then you don’t know us. From the start, we did not think they were going to call. However we were surprised that one of the top 10 telecom CEOs actually got our blog post, read it and considered calling. This is a clear signal that our base message: “The telecom sector needs to innovate or things will get messy” was spot on. There are three things that sell in this world: sex, gossip and controversy. If you want to deliver a message to a large audience that does not want to listen, pick at least one as your theme and build a guerrilla marketing campaign around it.
If you think that we are now organising the Bitpipe Accelerator Den, then you are also wrong. Yes we would be able to assist in supplanting inefficient telecoms with efficient Google Mobile and Fiber. However would that serve a lot of people? Do you really want lawyers to start calling you with offers to help you with your divorce because Google detected that your partner is looking into it but hasn’t told you yet? Do we really want to see large 300.000 employees companies reduced to 3000 because they are now bit pipes? Telecom downsizing is not pleasant. So please if you are working in the telecom industry, or in any industry that is the victim of disruptive innovations, then please keep on reading and become a Dinovator…
Dinovators are people that wake up one morning and find that the company in which they have been working for many years has been converted into an IT dinosaur. Not because the employees have been doing something wrong but because the outside world just went too fast and out innovated them. You now have two options: 1) Jump ship 2) Show dinosaurs how to innovate. If you are a Dinovator you prefer option two.
So how can you innovate in a traditionally minded company? You can go and show slides. You can go and tell everybody that the wolf is coming. However we tried those approaches years ago and you will fail. Majorities and laggards don’t want the status quo to change because they have a vested interest in it and they don’t know if they will have so in the new reality.
What works however is seeing magic with your own eyes. Anybody that has seen and touched the future can’t deny it any more. Now how can you show the future to people? First of all you need to understand their problems. If in the telecom industry the problem is revenue generation, then don’t go and show them a new proposal for a better protocol or faster network. Show them how new revenue can be generated, churn reduced, cost reduced, OTT revenue generated, etc.
So if you are technical then you can use the cheapest X86 server with 6 ports or any other device you can get your hands on and put an open source operating system like Snappy Ubuntu Core and you can create some Snappy Apps to show that there is a better future and can convert it into the smartest switch that solves the 4 biggest telecom industry problems. You can use the open source Juju charms and some cloud to show how complex telecom software can be abstracted and how for instance an open source SMSC can have a rest API with three parameters [to, from & message] and still deliver the same SMS service as that very expensive box that has all types of SMPP and other useless APIs and takes months to integrate with. If you are in financial services, retail, logistics, industrial, energy, etc. then you can probably find some other cheap box that can be Snappyfied or open source software that can be charmed so you can show your magic.
If you are not technical but have access to suppliers then you just ask them to surprise you with what they can come up with if they would apply disruptive innovations like Snappy and Juju. If you promise them that you will arrange a meeting with the boss of your boss if they surprise you, then they will be happy and surprise you for sure.
However to accelerate “dinovation” and to be inspired with what a community of dinovators can do, our proposal is to use Twitter. Just tweet a 1 minute video or a short blog post about your “dinovation” and include #dinovator and @telruptive. If you see tweets with great “dinovations” then you retweet them and share them with colleagues, customers, partners and bosses. This way you can become part of the the Dinovator Movement. The Dinovator Movement is not accepting that companies that have been around for many years are useless and need to be substituted. The Dinovator Movement is about showing that even in the most traditional companies there are Dinovators at work that show how that company needs to adapt to the new reality. The Dinovators explain to management that what is needed is Innovator’s Dens in which partners, customers, suppliers, etc. are invited to participate and innovation can be accelerated without RFPs and wasting everybody’s time. A Dinovator wants their company to embrace the new reality and thrive on it. Open Source has made becoming a Dinovator super easy. Nobody will put a critical system in production without paid support so even business people will be happy with open source Dinovations. However open source has a magical power, it does not get stopped by RFPs. So use its power. Have a Dinovator Day…
Software defined radio is going to be the next revolution
Communication experts will say that software defined radio has been around for many years now and is heavily used in mobile base stations. The truth is that until now it was extremely expensive. Only the large network equipment providers were able to use them at scale.
In the next months this is about to change. Software defined radios will become cheap and omnipresent.
Why are cheap SDR boards a revolution?
Easy. Currently all wireless communication standards are defined in large corporations or foundations. These standards are all but easy to use. Before Arduino and Raspberry Pi entered the market, hardware was something only specialised experts backed by large corporations could be working on. Now anybody will be able to make a quick prototype, put a video on Kickstarter and become a multimillion startup.
If radio communication protocols can be made by thousands of small startups and innovators then the future protocols will be easier to use, lighter, and faster than the current generation.
What would you build on top of cheap SDR boards?
Obvious things would be amateur radio, drone control, next-generation wireless protocols, IoT sensor communication, etc. However we are looking for some crazy ideas that would surprise lots of people. If you have a crazy but exciting idea, just add a comment to this blog. We want to work with you…
Dear Telecom CEOs: Innovate or Be a Bitpipe. Make your decision now!
Dear Daniel Mead (Verizon), Li Yue (China Mobile), Randall Stephenson (AT&T), Vittorio Colao (Vodafone), Masayoshi Son (Softbank), Cesar Alierta (Telefonica), Timotheus Höttges (DT), Carlos Slim (America Movil), Hiroo Unoura (NTT), David Thodey (Telstra), etc.
Only 5 of you will be able to see the most disruptive telecom innovations in the world. Innovations that will solve your 4 biggest problems ($B new revenue, zero churn, costs/10, OTT revenue) and can be in production in 2016 if you want them to. If you are not interested in seeing them, no problem:
Dear Xaviel Niel (Free.fr), Mister/Miss Google MVNO (whoever you are),
In October we will organise an event. If the previously mentioned individuals are interested in solving their 4 biggest industry problems, then you are invited for free to join and see their industry’s biggest innovations. In case they roll them out too slow then you can show them how it is done. If for some strange reason they are not interested, then you are still welcome because we just change the topic of the meeting from telecom innovators den to bitpipe accelerator den and you will be in company of some of the most famous venture capitalists. We will keep you posted on the interest of the telecom CEOs…
Dear telecom investors,
You seem to be the only one telecom CEOs listen to nowadays. After all these years, the telecom industry has not been able to get right even their dumbest service, i.e. voicemail [please let me know if you love using it and I will apologies to you]. Personally I invented in 2010 already solutions to create personalised value added services on the cloud. The same week the solution won one of the industry’s most important innovation awards, one of their biggest suppliers (the company I worked for) pulled investment because telecom operators were not interested in revenue generating solutions for consumers. Telecom only wanted faster 4G back than.
Fast forward to 2015. Telecom operators are enjoying putting up more data pipes and buying more spectrum so Youtube and Netflix can fill them up immediately without given operators any revenue. Call and SMS revenues are disappearing fast. They haven’t got any new revenue generator lined up. They have a data tsunami in the form of Internet of Things waiting to destruct their networks, and it is coming in the next 2-3 years. They are investing their marketing budget in launching “innovative” tariff plans. Their IT departments are spending billions on obsolete Oracle, VMWare and Redhat technologies. Their internal processes are crippling any progress. Their procurement processes mean in practice that you have to wine and dine middle management during 18 months, educate them on your innovations, help them write an RFP so all your competitors can now start undercutting you on price and add useless features to score more points. We have never seen an RFP that asked the right questions like: [score from 0 to 10], will this solution bring new revenue, will it reduce churn, is the solution easy to use, integrate and scale, etc. Any Silicon Valley startup that mentions to a VC that they want to work together with telecom operators looses any chance of funding immediately.
We are an open source company so anybody can download and use our solutions. We recently brought a phone to market. Five years behind anybody else but it still became front page news on their biggest event of the year. Our cloud team was able to demonstrate how in minutes anybody can deploy, integrate and auto-scale a working mobile network with open source mobile phones, open source base stations and all open source back-office solutions. We are not an unknown company. Our operating system powers around 70% of the workloads on the biggest public cloud and 63% of the OpenStack private clouds most of them are now slowly migrating to. We can set up in hours private clouds with the software defined networking solutions of any of their suppliers and have network function virtualization orchestration working unlike their regular suppliers that only do slideware. We don’t like to go and waste our time on their standardization groups because lately none of their non-networking standards had any traction. We rather prefer to give them working solutions for their real problems. We power the biggest super computer in the world. We are the default desktop for Google programmers. We are the only company that has a solution to deploy, integrate and scale telecom solutions in two clicks and we made it available as open source. Please try it yourself. The most amazing thing is that we were able in two weeks with a very small team to convert the cheapest Intel server with 6 ports we bought on Amazon into the smartest switch of MWC that can solve their four biggest industry problems.
We have access to the best technologies and most innovative partners in the world. We are willing to train their brightest employees and show them how to solve their 4 biggest industry problems in a unique telecom innovator’s den in October where they will be able to decide if they want the technology to be in production in 2016. However what we don’t have is a big sales force that can wine and dine them. Patience to wait for their RFPs. So if you think they should take our offer, please instruct them to bid for one of the 5 telecom groups we have seats for. We can’t help all 900 of them because we are only 700 employees. We are not doing this for money because if they start putting crazy high bids then we will use the extra money to seed several of the innovative open source telecom startups that can help their industry.
If you think this situation is completely ridiculous and you don’t want to loose your hard earned money, I suggest you give them about a week to read this blog post. You probably want to forward it to them, in case they mist it. If by then you don’t see another blog post about how happy we are that the telecom industry is ready to embrace open source, my suggestion is that you sell your telecom stock while you still can. Our bitpipe accelerator den will not care about their stock market performance and probably so should you in that case…
EDITED: Read what happened next.
5 worst bitpipe nightmares
The taxi world was unchanged for years until innovators took an interest in it. Hailo made it super easy to get a taxi. Uber makes taxis irrelevant. The worst thing for taxi drivers is that they were out of control of their own destiny. What would be the worst nightmares for telecom operators and traditional network equipment providers?
1) voicemails and millions of VAS that customers love
Why would this be a nightmare? Simply the fact that the most likely provider of millions a really valuable communication services is unlikely to be a traditional telecom provider. They haven’t been able to do it for years. Cloud providers or challengers are ideally positioned to add customisable cloud communications to their portfolio. Salesforce already offers WebRTC.
2) Chatty IoT
Billions of dumb and smart things will be connected to the Internet in the next 12-24 months. What if IoT hardware providers see the internet as a free transport layer and share useless data? Any device that sends 200 bytes every 5 seconds and of which 1 million get deployed, provokes 3 petabytes of useless data every day. After 10 days it would have produced an equal amount of data as the total combined literature in any language from the beginning of time until some years ago. There are many devices that could be chatty, e.g. heartbeat monitors, temperature and other sensors in home appliances like fridges, etc.
3) Cheap 4K security cameras
As soon as 4K cameras become cheap (<$50) then a tipping point will push lots of homes and businesses to install them. One cloud company is enough to provoke broadband hell. There is not a single broadband network that can handle 4K video upstreaming at large scale.
4) Mexico’s community mobile operators being successful
In Mexico there are several remote regions that were not served by traditional mobile operators. The Mexican government allowed anybody to use spectrum in these regions to build alternatives options. The innovators have moved in. What if they become too successful and customers like their services more than what traditional mobile operators are providing?
5) An innovator that uses technology to provoke telecom havoc
Until now over the top players have ignored telecom operators and are trying to eat their lunch. What if the next innovator designs solutions in such a way that operators can choose between the stick and the carrot? Ignore them and suffer or play according to their rules. It is easier to do than operators think…
How the cheapest X86 with 6 ports can solve the 4 biggest telecom industry problems!
The 4 biggest telecom industry problems are:
1) lack of new revenue streams to offset call and sms falling revenues.
2) high churn because connectivity is a commodity
3) due to a data explosion without new revenue, costs of the network need to come down substantially
4) over the top players provoke the data explosion but generate no revenue
Before you can understand how these 4 problems can be solved, you first need to understand how Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) together with a limited group of brilliant partners converted the cheapest X86 with 6 ports into the smartest switch of Mobile World Congress 2015.
Now imagine that this smartest switch or its official name Software Defined Networking Appliance (SDNA) was not a switch but instead was a customer premise equipment (CPE) that a big telecom operator had installed in a small shop. The shop owner would have used the Telecom operator’s Snapp Store to buy the Balabit Firewall, F5 Linerate, a Microsoft solution, etc. Since The operator gets a revenue share from all the solutions and snaps that get sold on top of their CPE as does Technicolor who build it, all of a sudden Technicolor is willing to provide The operator with free CPEs and the operator converts a device that used to cost a lot of money into a big revenue generator. This is an example of how problems 1 and 3 get solved. Now since this shop owner also bought Devicehive and Kaa Snaps all of a sudden all his lights, heating, ip cameras and the display in the shop window are connected to his CPE. Thanks to a brilliant Kaa Twitter Snap, his shop has become a national social networking hit and press has been filming his shop window all day long. Do you really think this shop keeper would want to change his CPE if a competitor would offer him a €5 discount on broadband? Problem 2 just got solved.
Now imagine that Alcatel Lucent would create a SDNA based on a Cavium board and install it instead of the DSLAM and Amazon would come along and say that if they allowed them to put Snaps from some of their biggest video streaming and gaming customers they would pay Alcatel Lucent and the telecom operator 50% of the revenue. All of a sudden problem 4 is solved.
Thanks to some more ideas from Canonical, a whole bunch of other telecom solutions become free and revenue generators and Fairwaves, Dataart, Metaswitch, Forgerock, Telestax, Truphone Labs, Nymi, Nwave, Lime Microsystems, Chaos Prime and Cybervision all get bought for billions.
However this cheapest X86 is not only going to solve the four biggest telecom problems. It is also going to solve several other problems. It is going do to away with senseless telecom middle management that send 5000+ questions in RFPs, complete lack of innovative thinking and years to go from idea to production.
Our next idea is how to convert all the ideas in this blog in products that are in production in a test site before the end of the year, rolled out at large scale before the end of next year and the next time a telecom operator wants to buy innovation they can do a complete procurement activity in two hours.
Edited. See here for our next idea.
How the cheapest X86 with 6 ports became the smartest switch on MWC15!
Two weeks before mobile world congress the Canonical offices received from Amazon one of the cheapest Intel servers with 6 Ethernet ports. It contains no hardware acceleration. Two weeks later employees from Ericsson, Cisco, Huawei, ZTE, HP Networking had to admit that they could not take us to see a smarter switch in the whole of MWC. This blog post is about what made this switch the smartest switch. The next blog post explains how this smart switch can solve the four biggest problems in the telecom industry (I.e. new revenue, churn reduction, cost reduction and OTT revenues).
So what made this switch so smart. First of all when we got it, it was an Intel server with an i5 processor and we had to go and buy 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD and put Ubuntu Core on it. The next thing our brilliant engineer Loic created was a Snapp App or Snap that made port 1 into WAN and the others into LAN. Now we actually had a switch. He and our equally brilliant head of R&D, Alex, also worked with F5 on a Snap that can boot up a KVM in which you run another operating system. This allowed us to put F5 Linerate in the switch. The end result is that we have the only Switch that very easily can support any exotic operating system to run on top. Via our Docker framework we could also run Docker based networking logic. However if you run the networking logic inside a Snap then this would give bare-metal performance with the flexibility of completely reconfiguring the switch by just deploying a different snap or adding multiple. If the engineers of the companies, that had to admit we had the smartest switch, want to win tomorrow then they just need to take a box with accelerated networking hardware and put a Snappy Framework that mediates between different Snaps that use network hardware acceleration. It would be the most flexible software defined networking appliance or SDNA out there. We also worked with the super engineers from Balabit that delivered a Firewall Snap in three days. So now we can assign Linerate to port 2 till 4 and Zorp to port 5 and 6. Making it a very flexible SDNA and Ubuntu Core the perfect NFV or SDNA operating system.
Zabbix already made one of our best written Juju Charms and they made a Snap of the Zabbix agent for ARM and Intel in no time. This means that our SDNA was now being monitored.
When telling the public that we called Microsoft to ask if they could write some software for our SNDA and open source it, everybody was surprised they said yes. The truth is that Microsoft is one of our best partners for quite some time now. Two days later we had a Snap that worked both on Intel and ARM and put a nice graph of the real-time load of our SDNA onto Azure. They even documented everything hence any programmer can connect Ubuntu Core to Azure super easy. Impressive work and thank you Microsoft because it made for a very surprising element in our story.
Even more surprising was the fact that we had ARM software running on Intel. Thanks to Forgerock and ARM we had an ARM mbed coap snap and mbed device server running in the cloud. Forgerock and ARM helped to put our SDNA inside a complete device management solution with identity and access management being seamlessly resolved.
However none of these solutions made us have the smartest switch of MWC. That was reserved to our amazing IoT partners Dataart and Cybervision. A simple €5 bluetooth low energy dongle integrated our switch with light and temperature sensors. Devicehive made our switch magically into a light controller. What was event more amazing was that via a Snap our switch became AllJoyn compliant and was the first switch to be able to talk to a television, dishwasher or fridge. The open source Devicehive will shortly be extended with Snaps for all possible IoT standards solving one of the biggest IoT problems for IoT developers instantly: interoperability. This will be the easiest way for any industrial gateway to become compliant with all types of standards. Also the cool open source IoT platform Kaa made our switch magical. Imagine how a shop can easily buy a Snap from a Snap Store that would be able to project Tweets onto a large LED display in the shop’s window. If only one Tweet every ten seconds would be randomly selected, it could start a new trend of Tweesplaying. The store that started it could potentially have millions of Tweets competing to be on the display and become an instant social network celebrity.
The last part was my most personal contribution. If you work with the most brilliant engineers you have to be able to ask intelligent questions. Nothing better than actually trying out the technology they just created. Thanks to a discount in Maplin, we were able to buy a robot arm for £35. Three hours later it was build. However there were no Linux drivers. I have been looking for an excuse to learn Golang and build something with Ajax. The end result is on github and you can now control the Maplin robot and make it do amazing demos via a Json script or some buttons.
All this would not have been possible without the contributions of all these amazing partners and colleagues, so thank you very much. So without any delay here is the smartest switch and the first software define network appliance, or SDNA. We hope somebody soon makes a smarter one because the hardware specs was embarrassingly low-end compared to what was available on the show.
See it move here.
Telruptive 