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Using Social Networking to Evolve Ideas – The Idea Factory for Telecom

Originally posted on 30Dec09 to IBM Developerworks where it got 9,113 Views

As I alluded to in my earlier post (Telcos capitalising on Social Networking tools), Telcos can use Social Networking tools to their advantage in a number of ways. I also mentioned the Idea Factory for Telecom – an adaptation of the basic Idea Factory offering now owned by Software Group Services for Lotus. This offering was originally put together by the High Performance On Demand Services (HiPODS) team and had no less than six servers minimally required for the offering. That is because the Idea Factory (or Innovation Factory as it was previously known but renamed due to trademark issues) was originally offered well before Lotus Connections was released. These days, small to medium implementations can be done with Lotus Connections, IBM Mashup Center and a number of templates and add-ons (widgets) for Connections. A Proof of Concept could potentially be done with a single server. Larger Idea Factory implementations – particularly where Telcos are hosting the service for their enterprise customers and MNVOs would also require a WebSphere Portal Instance as well.

Probably the best explanation I can give to you of the Idea Factory is for you to watch the recorded demonstration I have available below  – in fact I have quite a number of variations of the same demo customised for different Telcos – the demo below  the most recent which was recorded before Connections 2.5 was released and so was done with beta version of Connections – see if you can spot the fault in the video! I tried to cover it up as much as possible because I needed to show this video to customers, but it’s in there and you will see it if you know what you are looking for…. 

For online access to the latest Idea Factory (V2) recorded demo – just launch it below… Also note that this is a lower resolution version for online use. I also have a larger version that I used for offline demos, it is 24Mb in size so I will share that with anyone that requests it rather than make it generally available.

Way back in 2007, there was a good whitepaper about the Idea Factory – I have uploaded it to Collaboration_to_innovation-leveraging_web20.pdf. This document is now quite out of date with respect to the technology used to deploy the Idea Factory (then called the Innovation Factory) – these days, we would use Lotus Connections 2.5 as the base platform and add widgets for the polling/surveys requirement and set up activities templates to manage the ideation process, then use IBM Mashup Center rather than QED Wiki which was a IBM Research developed Mashup Environment (check youhtube.com – there are lots of QEDWiki demos available).

The Idea Factory for Telecom fosters collaboration by incorporating a self-service portal for consistent user experience and integration.
Aside from this limitation, the concepts expressed in the whitepaper and the usage of the Idea Factory remains relevant. I guess one point that this whitepaper makes it that IBM has been in this Web 2.0 game for a while now – longer than we have had Generally Available product to support the concepts.

If we look at the above diagram, Lotus Connections will take care of most of the Collaborative Services and the Portal (UI) requirements while IBM Mashup Center takes care of the Services Cluster and the Services Catalog (called the Widget Catalog in the Mashup Center).

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Telco System Evolution

Originally posted on 26Nov09 to IBM Developerworks where it got 11,308 Views

I had a request on the other week to create a number of topology diagrams that showed how a Telco might start small and grow their environment to add new capabilities and services. This was specifically for a telco in Vietnam, but I figured it would make sense to generalise the presentation and the images to make it usable for other opportunities. We’ve had a similar request from other telcos recently as well. The presentation step through 11 phases from a pilot/trial environment through to a full blown system. Each slide has speaker notes explaining what is being added at each phase in terms of products and capabilities. This presentation is not meant to make any recommendations on how to evolve form a small system to a more complex and capable one. What it is supposed to illustrate one possible evolution… Note that it focuses only on the IBM components and some other components would also be required for some phases (such as a transcoding engine in the media extension phase).

Below are three of the diagrams – Phase 1, Phase 6 and Phase 11 and the speaker notes that go along with that phase – to give you a feel for the flow…

Phase 1 – Test Environment

Phase 1 – Test Environment

At this first stage, an initial deployment might be considered a proof of concept or a trial – which could become the test and or ISV environment,  The functions that this could offer are:

  • Composite applications that bring together functions provided by the network.  For instance an application that consumes SMS messaging and integrates the location of the handset into an app. 
  • WSRR will get them down the path of SOA Governance – it is important to get this in early to ensure that the governance model is maintained and the Telco will now need to rework services that are created at this stage.
  • Complex workflows and business processes can be built which include human tasks (such as prototype processes for the production implementation )

Phase 6 – Developer Ecosystem including Web 2.0

Phase 6 introduces the Developer Ecosystem components such as :

  • Idea Factory for Telecom – which will help make a dispersed group of developers into a community.  It enable the sharing of ideas and a framework for the Telco to manage the evolution of the ideas that are generated within the community.  It also provides a rapid prototyping capability via…
  • IBM Mashup Canter which allows users to drag widgets onto a workspace and simply wire them together.  It is both the development and the runtime architecture.  This means that developers don’t need deep development skills in order to build new applications.
  • WebSphere sMash which provides a PHP and Groovy scripting environment (both development using the Dojo toolkit and the runtime environment)

This combined with the web services exposure deployed in phase 4 means that the developer ecosystem can now cater for all levels of developers – those with no skills can use the drag and drop mashup environment, script developers can use sMash and more advanced developers can use the web services interface.  In the backup slides there is an illustration of this.

For advanced developers the Telco can support developers across a range of IDEs ranging from Rational and Eclipse (where we have Telecom Toolkits available for free) to other IDEs (such as Microsoft Visual Studio or Sun Netbeans) where the IDE has tools to assist developers with consuming web services.  In all the IDEs, developers will consume the Web Services Description Language (WSDL) file from a UDDI directory in the DMZ.  The UDDI directory (part of WPS) is populated from the WSRR internal services repository.

Phase 11 – IMS integration and extension

When the Telco goes down the IP Mulitmedia Subsystem (IMS) path, the software deployed already has IMS enablement, but at this point we can also add WebSphere Presence Server (PS) and WebSphere XML document Management Server (XDMS – formerly WebSphere Grouplist Manager) which provides IMS services for the IMS services plane.  The core infrastructure that was deployed way back in phases 1 and 2 are critical to the IMS Services plane. 


It is important to understand that the phases I have split them down into are purely arbitrary and are not necessarily what would happen in a real telco. Which function occurs at what point and in combination with other functions is something that must be driven by the business requirements of the telco.  The intent is to illustrate how a telco could start small and add function incrementally building on the previous investments.

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Network speeds in the developing world

Originally posted on 29Nov09 to IBM Developerworks where it got 6,943 Views

I get regular emailed updates from one of the newspapers here in Australia (The Sydney Morning Herald in this case) – A few months ago, there was an interesting article about a IT company in South Africa who found it was much faster to transfer data by carrier pigeon then electronically.  For reference, it is available here http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/carrier-pigeon-faster-than-south-african-isp-20090910-fi9h.html

To quote the article:

Carrier pigeon faster than South African ISP

September 10, 2009 – 10:53AM

A South African information technology company proved it was faster for them to transmit data with a carrier pigeon than to send it using Telkom, the country’s leading internet service provider.

Internet speed and connectivity in Africa’s largest economy are poor because of a bandwidth shortage. It is also expensive.

Local news agency SAPA reported the 11-month-old pigeon, Winston, took one hour and eight minutes to fly the 80 km from Unlimited IT’s offices near Pietermaritzburg to the coastal city of Durban with a data card was strapped to his leg.

Including downloading, the transfer took two hours, six minutes and 57 seconds — the time it took for only four percent of the data to be transferred using a Telkom line.

continues….

Okay, it was a bit of a stunt.  I am sure if I posted  a 32Gb SD Card to the Sydney (standard mail service- often next day delivery, but sometimes the day after that), it would arrive faster than I could transfer that content from my home office.  What does that prove in terms of available bandwidth?  Not much really – SD cards can hold an incredible amount of information these days.  I have worked with customers in the past who shipped hard-drives around when they needed to transfer large amounts of data – even today – on most networks, it would be faster to courier a 1Tb HDD anywhere in the world than to transfer that much data over the wire.

The article did get me thinking though.  I travel quite a bit around Asia and have experienced first hand the speed of networks in many countries.  I’ve seen networks slower than a dial up modems (in Vietnam IBM Office) – in fact I reckon that my mobile phone as a modem over an EDGE connection (3G in Vietnam is very patchy) would have been faster than the IBM office network connection.  This is not a unique situation – in many countries I visit, the network speed is faster in my hotel than it is at the local IBM office. 

How does this effect the way we behave?  Lets look at a specific example.  Last year, I was doing a lot of work for the Globe Telecom SDP project that we eventually won with NSN in the Philippines.   I was using Cattail (an IBM Research project for sharing files – similar functionality to the Lotus Connections Files capabilty that we now have in MyDeveloperworks)  to upload files so that the local IBMPH IBM team could get to them rather than clog up their mail boxes.  Smart – or so I thought.  With Cattail, you are able to see who is downloading your files – often quite interesting as it was in this case.  I noticed that only one person in the Philippines was downloading the files, despite notifying about 12 people that they each needed to look at the content.  After a while I asked this one person why no one else was downloading the files from Cattail – he told me that because the network was so slow, most people were unable to even load the Cattail page to begin the download, so he went through the pain for everyone, then emailed the files around the local team!  So much for not clogging up their mail files.

I am constantly frustrated by the US centric assumption that the whole world has the same bandwidth available to them as they do.  Even in Australia, I am paying AU$68 per month for 12Gb of traffic – typically around 2 Mbps actual (10Mbps claimed capacity) downstream and  250 kbps actual upstream. By US standards, that must seem slow, but by the standards of developing nations in ASEAN, that’s pretty darn good.  There is still a huge digital divide between the haves (the US) and the have-nots (developing nations) – while some countries will have fibre to the home deployed (or being deployed) over the next few years – Singapore will be done very quickly I anticipate – I wont have that sort of speed available to me  until 2012 the Australian federal government claims (I expect it will be more like 2020 though as I do not live in the inner suburbs of Melbourne)

So, what point was I trying to make?  I am not sure.  I am frustrated at my bandwidth sometimes (usually not) but in countries that I visit, the whole nation must feel frustrated.    I often see web pages sizes in excess of 500kb  – a ridiculously large size and unusable in most of Asia.  Application designers need to be mindful of the bandwidth availability if they hope to be successful in Asia. If you have thoughts, please comment…

🙂 PS  The other thing this article reminded me of was RFC 1149 -A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers  Although I know that carrier pigeon transmission of IP packets (datagrams) would go anywhere near the throughput achieved by strapping a SD card to the pigeon’s leg.
 

Image credits : Photo from Stock.XCHNG