Eye of Newt, and Toe of Frog

So here we are.

Six independent Voyces in the communications industry.  Six people in leadership positions in businesses that deliver communications services to consumers and enterprises independently of what used to be thought of as the telecommunications industry.  And six leaders of companies that would be thought of as small or even tiny by Wall Street standards.

A decade ago you wouldn’t have been able to assemble this group.  We simply would not have existed.  A decade ago the investment required to build a communications company was an investment on the scale of building a giant engineering project – dams, nuclear power plants, skyscrapers, bridges and roads.  There wouldn’t be small businesses like ours, innovating quickly, and delivering value direct to the customer, oftentimes with the internet as the primary distribution vehicle.

A sea change has happened from 1996 to today that has enabled this market.

Deregulation, beginning in the United States, and now largely global, has forced incumbent players to open up their networks to third parties. Where there used to be a few large service providers controlling the services delivered to customers, there are now many more service providers, and wholesale delivery of basic network services like origination and termination available to independents.

Technology advancements, beginning with the use of commodity components like industry standard microprocessors from Intel and AMD, have driven the costs of the platforms required to deliver these services way down.  Today, a $10,000 general purpose web server can serve the same function as did a $5 million switching platform from Nortel or Lucent ten years ago.

Web development methodologies have collided with the communications world, allowing rapid development of new services using technologies like scripting languages, web frameworks, and data description languages like XML. My first job in the communications industry was writing a b-tree indexing scheme for Nortel switching platforms in a variant of the Pascal language written in-house by Bell Northern Research.  I spent 4 months working on it.  In today’s environment, a developer would simply load up an open source database tool like MySQL and get to work on building applications. To the telecommunications industry, web development methodologies are like the asteroid that struck the earth millions of years ago and wiped out the dinosaurs.

The cost of entry to be in the business of delivering communications products is dramatically lower than it has ever been, and continues to fall.  As a result we’ve seen an explosion of creativity in this space – a renaissance of sorts in which companies and individuals alike merrily combine communications, web, mobile and desktop technologies into a heady “witches brew” of innovation.

And no one, least of all me, dares predict what the result might be.

Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and caldron bubble.
Cool it with a baboon’s blood,
Then the charm is firm and good.

Shakespeare’s Witches, opening scene, Macbeth