There’s a rumor (based on a recent Business Week article) that Apoena is being acquired by Intel. Alan Quayle has been pointing out that on the surface this makes as much sense as, “Audi buying an Irish ice cream chain.”
Intel, over the last 30 years, has shown a willingness to try to sell more chips through telecom. The company has bought some and then sent them out again (Dialogic), and in other cases even tried to hit telecom with new standards.
So it’s both scary and exciting to see this latest news.
While this may be looked at as “the next generation,” and that times and needs change, there are a lot of overtones for those who have lived the past.
Proshare – Blue: Proshare – Red. These were Intel’s early video conferencing systems that were pretty cheap to buy and hard to install. Trying to make the phone network support digital was a scientific experience of making the wires “whistle.” Supporting digital formats for video and data gave birth to ISDN.
As a solution, it never quite fit into the big strategy theme everyone had for it. Video solutions were choppy and the network had so many parameters to configure, that the odds of getting it right was about as simple as getting the silver ball through the labyrinth.
Intel’s Proshare Red and Blue were based on the service order specification for a Nortel (Blue) switch or a Lucent – Red – Switch. We (I was in the Telco then) still had a hard time getting the order worked.
The end result was a universal system that did not match well enough to all the requirements, and has been a costly implementation for a market that should migrate. Compare that to the Internet Protocol and you see adoption and adaptation as it should be.
Once we learned how to make the computers “whistle,” we discovered that the switches needed relief from all these concurrent sessions. The result was a period of strategies that tried to offload the switches with pre- and post- traffic management solutions. This gave birth to softswitch strategies.
Lots of solutions were suggested and tried, but in the end, only a few got implemented.
Intel’s Server Solutions have survived the generations of Internet Data Centers and have gone from virtualization to cloud services.
The problem now is not only getting through a wireless network, but how to bring the core closer.
Late last decade, we saw Bladeware being offered in a RAN, and then we saw Wi-Fi take the burden of offload. Now, we have the virtualization of the Evolved Packet Core with SDN. Companies again have slides that show traffic being managed and processes being configured on the fly.
Like the generations before the vision, which can be self-fulfilling, some companies get bought and sold based more on vision then reality. Strangely, the older generation may have the better vision.
Edited by
Braden Becker 
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