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COVITS
ko'-vits.
(21c) n. Commonwealth of Virginia Technology
Symposium. v. to acquire knowledge about
technology
If
there ever was a good time to COVITS in
Norfolk,
September is it. COVITS, for the
technology-challenged, is the annual Commonwealth
of Virginia
Information Technology Symposium.
Successive governors have used the symposium, in
the invitational words of Secretary of Technology
George C. Newstrom, “to improve technology in
the Commonwealth, attract investment to a growing
technology-based economy, and to revolutionize
government service delivery to Virginia
customers.”
As
broad objectives, those are fine and good. But
more is at stake in the September 26-28 symposium,
as speakers drawn from MCI and Verizon, Microsoft
and Sun, Symantec and IBM, Oracle and Nortel
illustrate. What is at stake is a better
understanding of convergence, and, yes, convergence
means a lot more than just how traffic enters
Interstate 64.
At
a personal level, you
experience convergence between your work and home
lives when you announce you're going on vacation
and your colleague assumes that you'll be phoning
into the meeting. At the global level, as COVITS
will help make clear, telecommunications,
computing and content are converging as well.
Companies and technologies in once-distinctive
sectors are slamming together and exploding old
business models.
Secretary
Newstrom is fond of pointing out from his own
private sector experience in the
Far
East
how far ahead of the U.S. Japan and South
Korea
are in distinct areas, such as broadband
penetration and wireless services delivery. Those
countries also have developed models for molding
and administering converged services. Starting
with voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) and music
and video entertainment, virtually all real-time
applications are being readied to run via IP. Not
only do operators manage networks, they customize
and personalize content. In turn, network
operators and business partners must change they
way they bill for services and share revenues.
Hence, the steady diet of rags-to-riches stories
on the one hand and road-to-ruin stories on the
other.
Convergence,
the Economist Intelligence Unit suggests in a
white paper this summer, is the ultimate
transformational challenge. “The
telecommunications industry wants to capture the
growth potential promised by convergence, but, in
doing so, it must abandon many time-honoured
practices even as it embraces partnerships
scarcely imagined just five years ago.” Once
obsessed by the network, one executive told the
Economist, companies now have to become obsessed
with the customer.
The
white paper points out that mobile music is now
twice as big as the market for recorded CDs in South
Korea
and that NTT DoCoMo of Japan earns over $700
million in non-voice revenue every month. A survey
of 100 global executives included in the paper
finds that companies cannot afford to wait for
technological obsolescence to launch convergence
strategies. Growing new revenue streams, retaining
customers and meeting the competition from new
service providers are objectives too critical to
postpone.
The
Economist also found in its executive survey that
positive vibrations are driving progress.
Executives surveyed cited migration to Internet
protocol-based networks, broadband penetration,
competition from new service providers, better
business models for operators and third parties
and open technical standards as primary factors
driving the adoption of converged network
services. Improved security, light regulation and
protection of intellectual property rights were
much less important.
Understanding
convergence requires, of course, suspending much
of what we already know. Some parents in other
states, for example, still wonder how their adult
children can engage in such long telephone
conversations without it costing any more money
than a “local call.”
“Not
everyone can be making money organizing phone
service this way,” those raised on time and
distance charges suggest, and for years they have
been absolutely correct.
Content
now includes not only information, words, images,
music and video entertainment, but also software
and finance. Money turns out to be just another
form of information. Everything that can be
digitized is being digitized. What can be
digitized can be integrated and bundled.
Convergence
drives unsolicited, innovative proposals from
private companies to the Virginia Information
Technology Agency. Convergence drives the need for
a review of the computer crimes act by the State
Crimes Commission. Convergence makes possible
COVANET connections for state agencies, schools
and businesses. Convergence requires private
sector advice to government on new problems, the
new shape of solutions, even new standards. In
this new world, the Federal Communications
Commission is now the arbiter of first and last
resort.
Take
as one example Fairfax
County’s USA Today review in late August of why a
relatively small acquisition by Motorola in 2002
could be so strategic. Motorola Ventures gobbled
up the assets of Vienna-based Xtreme Spectrum,
which explains itself dryly as a “fabless
semi-conductor company developing ultrawideband
technologies for wireless systems.” But what
Motorola saw was an entry point into a market for
ultrawideband chips and consumer products
estimated in the article to be $1 billion by 2008.
Ultrawideband
technology (UWB), which uses pulses of radio
energy, will enable next generation in-home
networking of everything that delivers digital
content and commercial wireless network
applications with less interference than current
Wi-Fi. But it will deliver, as the article points
out, only if engineers can set an UWB standard.
The battle is raging between Motorola and smaller
companies with a direct sequence (DS) or
continuous stream technology pitted against a much
larger contingent of companies, some with big
names such as Intel, Texas Instruments, Microsoft
and HP, with an OFDM (orthogonal frequency
division multiplexing) technology. You know which
alternative extends battery power in your
handheld, right?
It
probably is too much to promise a breakout session
on ultrawideband at COVITS on such short notice,
but Verizon’s “next generation network for Virginia,” MCI’s “IP
convergence revolutionizing industry” and
Nortel’s “business case for convergence”
look like great places for anyone to boost his or
her covitsing. And that a writer can transform a
symposium into a verb is just another example that
no part of our experience will go untouched by
convergence.
--
September 7, 2004
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