Ravi Blogs about IT Topics

I was invited to attend the AT&T Executive Summit by Brian Harvey, who is our AT&T representative. In the event you are not familiar, we have been a long term customer of AT&T for all long distance and international calls and SNET (and then SBC) customer for local telephone service, telephone service to woodframe houses, and  DSL service to the woodframe houses for a year. Now that SBC and AT&T have merged, Brian is our single point of contact for all of these services. Dealing with phone companies has been an experience that I won’t go into here, but our recent renegotiation with the combined SBC/AT&T has been one of the best so far and Brian was instrumental in making sure everything went off well. So, when he asked if I would like to attend this meeting in my new role as the CIO, I gladly agreed primarily because of the way it was presented to me…  

This is an opportunity to meet with members of our senior leadership team at AT&T as well as a group of your peers to discuss relevant issues facing IT leaders in today’s fast paced, ever changing environment.  Two of the topics are Disaster Preparedness and Security.

After spending 5 days in Chicago with our son Vivek who is doing his internship there, I arrived in NY City Monday night and stayed till Wednesday afternoon. First of all, AT&T staff are one of the most gracious hosts. They took care of us extremely well, were very friendly and easily approachable and were very receptive to the audience comments.

I really liked many of the presentations, specifically the talk on Network Strategy by by Andre Fuesch which reminded me of some of the leading technologies that came from AT&T and Bell labs and the one by  Susan Bailey on Disaster Recovery. Another talk of interest was by Michael Antieri on Dynamic Networking Solutions was about their vision of being a company that provides a virtualized and dynamically adaptive IT environment to the clients. I have all the presentations with me, so if you are interested, let me know.

And finally, the roundtable discussion with the CIOs from three Higher Ed… I shall refrain from any comments…

I was constantly looking for a direct connect between the presentations or the other casual talks we had and IT in higher education. I  failed to see many connections. It was  fascinating to see how well prepared AT&T is for major disasters and how quickly they restored services to critical locations after Katrina; but how exactly does that apply to us? We always assumed that the telephone company will get us back on our feet asap. Our network connectivity (like many others) are through state sponsored high speed networks and we are at the state networking group’s mercy for disaster recovery. Shifting to AT&T for data network services is not practical just based on disaster preparedness because they typically cost 3-4 times what the state contract is…

Similarly the new technologies that are coming out of the AT&T Labs to provide a more coherent, redundant, and integrated data/voice transport backbone is very impressive and I am sure we collectively are going to benefit from all of these advances, but  it was not clear exactly how a higher ed institution can take advantage of this – unless we are willing to revamp our internal infrastructure dramatically.

The dynamic networking solutions holds some promise in that one of the services that they are willing to provide are remote backup of data as well as applications hosting. The first aspect is  interesting and if we know how much it costs, we may be interested. However, in terms of applications hosting, the proposal makes sense, but it was not clear to me that a lot of thinking has gone into this – what types of applicaitons, what are the parameters, how much would it cost? Applications are complex and unless you get an application that scales, this will not work.

Take for example, PeopleSoft. No two schools use the software the same way. So what exactly does it mean to host PeopleSoft? A different set up for each institution? No way this will scale to make it cost effective! On the other hand, I can see some of the most often used apps such as E-mail, word processing or Spreadsheet can lend themselves to the hosting model. This on the other hand creates a whole slew of issues – how do you assure privacy and security (very different issues when the data and apps are hosted elsewhere than on the campus network)? I can go on and on, but basically I didn’t feel that this whole thing has been well thought out. It is no seceret that I love Google’s approach to all of these through their GMail hosting offer and pretty soon writely and spreadsheet offers.

 It is very possible that this is NOT what they meant by applications hosting. If so, no one explained it to me .

All in all, I came out with the feeling that AT&T is still one of the best infrastructure company – they are talking about taking the fiber to the first (or what we call the last) mile or being able to splice the fiber to get things going during disaster with much more passion than application hosting – and want to get into content (something everyone keeps talking about but no one gets specific). At least the concerns are there that you cannot simply be an infrastructure company and thet you need to do more and diversify more. I just didn’t see anything in this meeting in terms of specifics on what is AT&T strategy in these directions and more importantly what is the relevance of all of these to Higher Ed.

Finally I pitched something to AT&T folks that I will do again. They cannot have a uniform pricing model for both the businesses and the educational community. The cost of broadband and internet access is an example – this is precisely why every state is going and building their own more affordable high speed network backbones. Time will tell if this is realistic and sustainable, but today it is. The last time we negotiated, 15 Mb connectivity to the internet would cost us $120K; the same year we signed up with Connecticut Education Network for less than half that for 30 Mb.  And we have not noticed any serious differences in service between our other ISPs and the state.

Whether it is backup data services or application hosting, develop a model that is attractive to the educational institutions (which in many cases are willing to band together and increase the volume); in return you can negotiate a way to get access to the students (this is a very controversial issue in many institutions, but it is worth a try) so AT&T can market other services such as cell phone service  or broadband service (where applicable)  to them.