iConverged

don’t claim to be a heavy eBAY user. But, I do buy and sell stuff occasionally and my recent experience selling stuff on eBAY could be a good indicator of what is probably worrying the execs of EBAY: Managing scale.For the past month or so, I’ve been trying to sell a laptop on eBAY. I’ve listed the items two times already and here is what happened both times:

1. Within hours of listing, I get sent messages of two categories: People who want to cheat the sytem and barter offline and scammers with manufactured or stolen eBAY identities who want the “usual” information. I spend valuable time dutifully forwarding it to the security folks at eBAY.

2. During the weeklong listing, I spend even more time responding to form responses from eBAY and handling email discussions with CallCenter agents who plainly have no expertise in managing security.

3. During the last day or two of the auction, I will have three or four genuine buyers who I communicate with and keep engaged.

4. During the last minutes, I see bidding begin and notice my genuine buyers being beaten by scammers with stolen identities win the auction with outrageous bidding. I cannot do anything. Things move at the speed of the Internet!

5. I then get a “Congrats” email followed by a “sorry, the scammers beat us” email and to protect the integrity of the network (read: eBAY probably doesn’t want this information getting public) the entire listing is removed.

This got me thinking and I’ve come to the following conclusions that you might or might not agree with:

- E-Commerce is now no different than regular commerce. An Internet business will initially probably have advantages due to the network effect, but in the end they will end up just like the other utilities: they will struggle to manage scale and offer a compelling service. My eBAY experience was no different than calling my telephone or cable company: Form responses, casual processes to address core business competencies, and frustrating customer service.

- Internet establishments will progressively develop a tiered system. The big customers will get all the attention and the small/occasional customers will not be able to take any advantage of the benefits the network provides. It won’t be egalitarian like it used to.

- Secure E-Commerce is elusive. Internet businesses who depend on earning money through customers they trust will struggle to keep their infrastructure secure. There is a constant struggle between expanding the user base and offering a secure environment. There has to be a better way than the best computer scientists being routinely defeated by the dolts with a phone and a laptop from the most “backward” regions of the world.

eBAY is probably the most innovative of Internet businesses. Their annual report proudly states:

This is not a post about management or technology, but something of utmost importance to us technologists. Do you like solving big problems? Read on…

SAHC, an exciting non-profit got started by the Bay Area El Camino Hospital, South Asian physicians, specialists, and generous donors. I am pleased to let you know that the center is out of its pilot phase and is now open. There was a well attended opening ceremony yesterday with a who’s-who in the South Asian community making their pitch for getting screened.

I want to do my part and share my experience with you: A few years back, on a plane ride to India, I read an interesting piece in India Today where there was preliminary research being done in Singapore, London, and Chicago (Dr. Enas Enas) on a genetic anomaly with South Asians that increased their chances of fatal heart attacks by 400%. Kaiser was also noticing an abnormal number of fatal heart attacks in the Indian community in the Bay Area.

I kept track of these events, learned of SAHC, and got screened a few months back confirming a few early markers. Once this was confirmed, a case worker was assigned to me and the SAHC hooked up with my primary care physician. They also sponsored a free fitness instructor at the YMCA and assigned a nutrionist to work with Meera and me on diet choices. Thankfully, I can postpone getting on drugs for a little bit more. Best of all, the service was all free and Aetna picked up a significant portion of the advanced lipid tests. I spent $69 in total for such world class service.

My long blog is to convince each and every one of you South Asians to get screened at http://www.southasianheartcenter.org/. This epidemic is real and will likely you. It does not matter if you are:

* Working out
* Rich
* Vegetarian
* Thin
* Stress Free
* Have had no other complications
* Have borderline cholesterol readings
* Are a woman

Please make time to sign up and get tested. Look at all the positives you will get by simply signing up:

* You contribute to some very cutting edge research that will save the lives of many of your friends and millions of South Asians. By 2010, India will have 60% of the CAD world burden. The median age of a South Asia CAD victim is fast dropping to the late 30s/early 40s.

* You will be in control of events in the eventuality of a cardiac event or a stroke. You will be armed with all the relevant information. You risk is already two times the US national average based on existing data. You risk increases 4-8 times if you have adopted a western lifestyle, smoke, or drink.

* A majority of South Asians in the US are just beginning to enter the danger zone. 5% of all ER cardiac events in the Bay Area are due to South Asians. You could be next! Act now!

* With changed lifestyle choices, you will indirectly contribute to combating childhood obesity/diabetes in the community and give our children a better future!

Please do sign up.

It’s tax season time and it’s only appropriate to discuss all things taxes, aka “surcharges” in our industry. I’ve always believed the incumbents with or without VOIP have a huge pricing power over any emerging technology that mimics what they offer.

Spunky voice providers like Vonage and SunRocket can offer cut-throat prices (aka spend their venture dollars on you and me), but they will never be able to displace the incumbents for basic residential service. Besides, take a look at my all-i-want-is-9-1-1 phone bill below and decide for yourself if at&t or the US Goverment is the competition in my area!

The odds are against them especially when Uncle Sam and his 50 nephews and nieces grab their share of surcharges and fees from you every month. Of course, you cannot call them taxes

And I don’t actually use my phone and have the service only for E-9-1-1.

I think the only way to compete is to fight on the access side and the events that are transpiring in the muni networks is the way to go. The fight is still in the pipes.

Voice, after all, is just another application on the network.

We all get so caught up on the mega-trends of technology that we sometimes miss the simple events that reminds us just how transforming IP is.

I had one such experience I want to share.

I came to the US in 1990 from India to go to grad school. In those days, AT&T used to charge me $2.65/min to call home. Communication was typically facilitated by having a network of expats who would carry home letters, gifts, and photographs! The Internet happened, at&t happened, and now I have literally free communication services to India. Great!

However, my parents lives were pretty much the same the past decade. They live in a humble home in a decent neighborhood and spend their retirement years with friends and family on a very modest pension.

And then, my Dad who is 68, learned about the Internet. He bought a computer, got broadband access, taught himself a variety of web programming languages, setup a family website, and finally setted on Flash programming. I absent mindedly encouraged him and assumed it was a passing fad. Boy, was I wrong!

The past year, my dad figured out that he could use his computer skills to rekindle his love for Math and Physics. He started building flash movies on a variety of basic physics concepts. He built simulators, arcade games, etc. He joined the flash developer’s forum. He even helped a local (US) organization publish a car game for kids.

His work is beginning to get noticed in his community of interest. He’s gotten emails complimenting his work from all over the world. Rafael, 75, a physics enthusiast and a mechanical engineer from Venezula wrote:

It is more about people all over the world empowered to express their creativity on a global scale and experience the Network. Broadband IP is just beginning.

Go Dad!

Whoa Corporate Rat! I still cannot seem to resist a good ol’ geek talk! One more of the year, OK?

It is just plain hard-work when you are trying to join a communications club that is several decades old with multiple generations of engineers developing distinct applications and services.

What is happening in the VOIP world is nothing new. Standardization is inherently complex. It becomes doubly more complex when you consider voice communication is of vital interest to multiple societies. It becomes triply more complex when the infrastructure being replaced is the most used and the most stable in the world!

Discussing your arguments:

1. Text based Protocol: Yes, SIP could have been XML based but THANK GOD it is not ASN.1.

2. Refusal to standardize services: I don’t know why the IETF should do this? Do you really think we could get two carriers to agree that Call Forwarding RNA should terminate in an intercept or ring forever? Or that Music On Hold is an “expected” feature in business applications all over the world?

I think the push for standardizing services has more to do with carriers being apprehensive that they will be locked into a proprietary solution. Industry groups like the SIP Forum are the right place to standardize services for their customers. OMA is another good example.

3. The Royal Routing mess: This is a legitimate argument. I am not too worried about Record-Route headers (HTTP has them too BTW). The SBCs, acting as giant B2BUAs in the sky, have made things a bit simple .

I think the SIP community needs to solve the hard problems (which I consider are routing issues): Lifeline services and lawful intercept.

4. Bloat Bloat Bloat: If you examine carefully, most of the complexities have to do with trying to model the PSTN in SIP. The industry secret is: You don’t need intelligence in the network for Alice to find and talk to Bob and you don’t need all this bloat for Alice to buy phone service with a handful of cool features… all you need to know is your outbound proxy and your service proxy. IMS architects, please listen!

5. This is not what SIP is meant for: Most of the original SIP “zealots” are healthy, wealthy, and Directors at rather successful companies… let’s leave it at that

6. Forking: LOL! It’s Forked !

7. E2E Architecture: I will let RFC 1958 speak for me. I rather like the fact the I didn’t have to wait on the SBC Yahoo! CallCenter for two hours since I got IP connectivity: Hosted email, music downloads, video on demand, chat, online bill pay, webmd.com… the phone companies still have BIG BIG plans for all of this… since 1955!

Skype is a remarkably successful and proven business model. It is always very easy to build a good proprietary solution. Going back to the email world example, Lotus did this rather successfully with cc:Mail. But, we don’t even discuss SMTP interoperability today… SIP will get there. The page that the SIP folks can take from Skype is:

1. Make configuration dead simple! Sorry, SIP endpoints suck at this!
2. Solve the NAT/Firewall issues. Good progress here!

BTW, Vonage has 1 million paying subscribers and they solved the same two issues that Skype did. And they are standards based (MGCP right?).

8. Backward Compatibility: Most of us have moved forward to 3261. Most carriers will not accept SIP solutions that are “ancient”.

In Conclusion

What blows my mind is that the technology is ready for a Google, Microsoft, or Y! to become the voice communications provider to the whole world! Just like email!

Isn’t that just incredible? It’s time one of them offer free phone service to the PSTN as well!

VOIP is a giant leap forward in dragging us “Call Processing” types out of the dark ages to the modern world. SIP is the motivation.

While SIP improved the interoperability between systems, it did not take away the inherent complexity of developing voice applications. Many of us VOIP application vendors basically built proprietary constructs from scratch (a HUGE benefit) that helped develop applications rapidly.

The net result is that voice applications continue to be developed by a select few.

Don’t get me wrong. We all use the latest and greatest available today: Object oriented design patterns for vastly improved software quality, SOAP for remote data access, CPL or equivalent for simple routing, VXML and MSML/MOML for media control, and a services oriented model for application delivery. However, they continue to be proprietary to the application vendor.

The best we can do is claim SOAP or SIP as the “API” for developing applications. Want to integrate a cool conferencing application as a “converged” application? Sorry, besides SIP “interop”, no can do!

Carriers are wising up to this.

They are demanding an open environment that doesn’t lock them into a particular vendor. Initiatives like IMS are forcing vendors to rethink and offer an open and integrated solution.

How far away are we from being able to place a call with a simple function call from any computing or communication device? Time will tell.

The best bet the industry has now is SIP Servlets. This technology has the provisions in place for rapid application development, an asynchronous programming model, and state of the art data access. Reputed vendors like BEA, IBM, and Oracle have application servers that are battle hardened in the Web world. They are scalable, robust, and boast of a stable developer community. The “traditional” PSTN community is also attempting to converge on a similar effort with JAIN SIP. This really completes the picture.

The new year looks promising! Is it time to talk about “Call 2.0″ ?

Managing Your Peers

There will come a moment in your career when you will face the stark reality that you have to manage some of your closest colleagues.

Further, if you are a top engineer, it is highly likely that the guys/gals you will manage are superstars too.

Things change when this event happens.

It happened to me. I went from being a prolific programmer to becoming an Engineering Director at a fast paced VoIP software company.

Here are a few tips that will help you through this transition:

1. Don’t compete: Resist the urge to code with your engineers. You might have all the technical answers but always remind yourself that you need to transition your engineering role to someone more competent. Use every opportunity to showcase your team.
2. Face your shortcomings: Being a good engineer does not automatically make you a good manager. You have to work at it. Understand your personality. Have an honest discussion with your spouse or close friend about how you react in a variety of situations.
3. Be positive: Be very optimistic about the things your team is working on. Don’t drain people by complaining or gossiping. Yes, it is hard not to share all the things you know with your “closest” friends, but don’t! Please!
4. Trust your boss: The one person who can help you manage the transition is your boss. He can set you up in such a way that your team begins to see your value as their manager: Trust me, they won’t see it initally. I had my top engineer ask me in a 1-n-1: What do you do for a living now?! It was a definite Dilbert moment
5. Find a mentor: Find a senior executive who would be willing to mentor you. I picked my VP of Sales and it is working great! He meets with me regularly and we spend time discussing a variety of topics except work.
6. Sweat the little things: Compliment your engineers for their wins. Encourage them during difficult times. Socialize with your team. Take them out to a movie! Celebrate their birthdays and significant life events. Spend a lot of time writing performance reviews.
7. Take it easy: Expect your team to tease you. Expect them to have a clique that does not include you. Give them space and don’t overreact if you are not in the know! There will be at least one in your team who will have decided that he could be better at your job. If you think the same, GREAT! Get ready for a promotion, you have just hired your replacement
8. Deal with it: As a manager, you are now replacable. Just face the reality and be prepared to work much harder to justify your “value” to the company. If you miss the challenge of hands-on work, take up something else that excites you. I rekindled a long lost affair with photography. And I enjoy every moment of it.

This is one time in your career where it pays to be a fat fingered programmer!