No Such Thing As a Free Launch

A week ago today, on the morning of May 14, there was a “hiccup” in the Google network that lasted about two hours, during which 14 percent of Google users found themselves inexplicably and helplessly transported from cloud computing to a cloud of confusion.

The good news for the IMS community is that Google is not even looking at IMS as a technology to strengthen its search engines, which include VoIP, e-mail, IM and virtualized tools, just to mention a few of the applications and services that are devouring a good chunk of the Internet bandwidth.

Arbor Networks posted some analysis and graphs regarding the event that show the chilling effect of Google traffic disappearing.

The first question is how much revenue Google lost in the process and how the outage affected the thousands of small businesses and individuals using Google mail. A more important question, in my opinion, is if Google is finally starting to see a trend in the series of outages that affect its best-effort cloud computing.

OK, so what’s wrong with a best effort service? It’s free — we all love a free service — but there’s no live customer service number to call and ask for help. So our love of the free service lasts until that service breaks. Then we start to think that reliability and availability may be worth some money — or, depending on your business, it may be worth a lot of money. Since Google services are free there are no metrics for service quality, availability or customer satisfaction.

The problem is not the outage; the problem is the fact that Google, so far, has not been able to demonstrate a level of control and management over its network that is consistent with the offerings of a Tier One applications service provider. Which causes one to ask whether Google, Yahoo, MSN and other large ASPs should consider adding a level of control and management support to their respective “clouds.” The phone companies endeavored to provide reliable phone service. To date, this quality of service element is not an intrinsic part of what we call Web 2.0 services. How important do users consider the reliability of e-mail, VoIP and IM to be, both socially and financially? As they would say in Twitter, “Essential!”

If we agree that Internet should no longer be “best service,” then control and management are “Essential!”

Manuel Vexler is chair of the technical working group in the IMS Forum. He is well known for his expertise in voice and multimedia over Internet, bringing more than 20 years of experience to roles such as the CTO of CopperCom and vice president of IMS Interoperability at the IMS Forum. He drove M&A at Cisco, and launched new technologies at CopperCom, AMD, Alcatel (Newbridge) and Nortel.