JBCP training class at Nortel

Last week, I had the privilege to teach a four day class on JBoss Communications Platform (Mobicents) to a team of sharp cookies from Nortel. I am usually not great at repeating the same presentation many times, so I appreciate it a lot when the audience is interacting with me - asking questions, catching bugs in the examples, or making fun of my drawings. Well in this case, the audience was so interactive that they made me feel I knew nothing about real world converged telco applications. I think I learned more from this class than I taught. Looking forward to go back to Dallas and spend more time with this team. They have several exciting projects lined up that will make a splash appearance sometime next year.

Japanese telcos still on the cutting edge

During the week of November 26, the Red Hat telco team had a series of meetings in Tokyo with the leading Japanese telcos. Okashita-san, responsible for business development in Japan, organized the logistics and included several folks from sales, marketing and engineering from the Tokyo office. Until this trip, I had no idea Red Hat has such a big office in Japan. The quality of the people in that office beat my expectations by a long shot. There was a lot of energy in the air. It was great to be part of it for a few days.







During our meetings, I learned a lot about the advancement and innovation created by the Japanese operators. Its no news that they have been world leaders in mobile technology for years. Still it was amazing to see their R&D labs first hand.







The engineers we met had the mentality found in US startups. The discussions were involved and technical. It was quite unusual scene for companies of such size. Even more exciting was the fact that these companies launched specialized open source departments focusing on OSS initiatives with the forward looking goal of introducing them to main product lines. NTT OSS for example in collaboration with NTT Labs have already identified specific areas of development and we were glad to help them.

Towards the end of our trip, the Red Hat business development team organized a media briefing. Following are some of the articles published after the event:
http://japan.zdnet.com/oss/story/0,3800075264,20362184,00.htm
http://enterprise.watch.impress.co.jp/cda/topic/2007/11/30/11755.html
http://www.atmarkit.co.jp/news/200712/03/redhat.html
http://japan.internet.com/linuxtoday/20071203/4.html
http://news.livedoor.com/article/detail/3410805/

Telco 2.0 Executive Summit, October 2007

Tom Wunderlich and I attended the Telco 2.0 Executive Summit on behalf of Red Hat. We presented the JBoss Communications Platform in the Product Innovation track. The content of the presentation was more technical than the audience expected. Tom had to improvise and bring around the technology message into one of value proposition meaningful to telco executives. Apparently it worked, because we god a fair amount of feedback. Consequently, the organizers of the summit were kind enough to post a blog entry related to our presentation.

The event was good in content and pace. There were about 200 people, most holding executive positions at incumbent or next generation telco companies around the world. There were a series of tightly scheduled presentations and product demos followed by short brainstorming sessions. I learned some interesting facts about the telco pain points, service usage statistics and consumer trends.