Monday, December 09, 2002

QoS vs. Open Standards Cory on Rod Smith: Open standards and quality of service: pick one. IBM's Rod Smith is speaking at the Supernova conference. In his intro, he cites a lot of customer demand for both open standards and quality-of-service guarantees. Aren't these antithetical? If I'm running open standards, then the software at my end of the network can be set to abide by or ignore any signals send by the software at your end (as opposed to a proprietary system where both ends are welded-shut-boxes that always and deterministically do whatever the software author thought was best). That means that even though your software requests a priority level of x and a guaranteed pipe of y, you have no way of knowing whether my software is actually delivering x and y. All you can send me is a suggestion -- not a guarantee. Not mutually exclusive.  With two clients running open systems and each buying their own service level agreements, the clients could act in a manner similar to cognitive radios with open spectrum, but that's theoretical.  But what Rod was talking about was not end-to-end, but enterprise-to-enterprise (which then extends it intra-enterprise to the end, mostly machines for grid computing).  This is accomplished via: VPNs with QoS guarantees, perhaps leveraging MPLS at least in the core of the service provider network Companies buying near wholesale IP Transit agreements with traffic specific SLAs.  Each leverages multi-homing that takes into account the cost of Transit and SLAs for each provider.  Or is there an open standard Im missing? What's not open about this all yet is standardization of tiers of QoS from Layer 3 and up.  But layer 2 and down is defined by ANSI (a DS-3 is a DS-3).  Or is there something Im missing. 11:18:53 PM    comment [] Rod Smith, IBM Fascinating to me, but much of IBM's new commodity management model, wasn't understood enough to be explored by the audience.  So the focus was from web services to the consumer in the value chain.  The missing piece was data commodities to web services. On Demand Responsive in real-time Variable cost structures Focused on differentiating Resilient, Global Drivers for Next Gen Biz Apps: inter-enterprise, integration & QoS.  Coordinating decentralization Requirements: Integrated Built on open standards - what's new is standard process is quicker Virtualized Autonomic Question of QoS tiers for commoditization.  This is not an issue, IMHO -- there are over 150 grades of West Texas Intermediate Crude WTI -- the largest oil commodity contract.  I doubt anyone in the room gets commoditization, but they will. Great questions in the summary slide: What if integration costs went to zero? What if IT disolves into the fabric of a company? What happens when integration decisions happen at <web service> deployment time or connection time... or business contract time? The real opportunity is accelerating the Innovation-Integration cycle.  Floor questions: Tom from UCB asks for examples of web services that delivers business value today.  WebBeacons took an internal app and ASPed it to eliminate 15 people who manually proceessed their trucking procurement 3 days to 4 hour turn around time, reduced cost by $1m.  e2open, UDDI and SOAP, now up to 600 companies integrated.  Dave Winer asks about Patents again.  IBM has not patented what's in SOAP.  Follow Marc's question on patents,  IBM asks startups they work with to adhere to open standards (which costs them considerably) -- reasonable answers. Isen: IBM had the world by the short hairs, but is now relatively decentralized.  How do we help Microsoft change like IBM did? language change connected with customers to get their view of the issues 5:41:46 PM    comment []

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