Dial tone is probably the most critical enterprise service of all IT services. Right
up there with payroll service, dial tone or the lack of it, can inspire 1,000 times
more passion than poor PC availability, e-mail spam, or elevator power outages.
That's because people have grown accustomed to high
quality audio in their personal and professional lives, and they continue
to demand it from the technology their company might employ.
For whatever reason, telecommunications departments have tended to have longer product
life cycles and more heterogeneous environments than any application or IT unit
in the company. More than anything else, that may have to do with the heritage of
limited innovation, oligarchystyle pricing, and high maintenance costs perpetuated
by telephone company repairmen in little white trucks. In fact, the multivendor
environment is probably due not just to the spate of mergers and acquisitions in
the customer environment over the past decade, but also to the geographic strength
of different vendor sales and service organizations, timing of projects, and the
natural tendency to keep vendors "honest" by splitting the business.