Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Rich Tehrani has a great post over on his blog about his conversation with Carly Fiorina and her upcoming keynote at ITExpo.  Sounds like it’s going to be a great speech!  One of the items they discussed was the separation between carrier and enterprise, quoted below:

In her words, telecom/datacom and service provider/enterprise are not separate realms. Instead of having to organize and respond along vertical chains of command we need horizontal collaboration across boundaries and companies.

The fundamental driver behind these statements is the fact that we don’t lead neatly segmented lives. Here’s a thought experiment – how many of the contact points shown in the chart below do you have?  How many would you like to have? How many will you have in five years?

If you’re like me, you probably have multiple email addresses, IM identities, a blackberry and so on.  You’re hyper-connected!

The biggest problem with the chart, of course, is that we no longer have a separate business identity and a separate personal personal identity anymore.  Those identities have become blurred together.  My kids phone me at work, and my business partner phones me at home.  Communications applications need to help me manage that blurry identity, and deal with the reality of living my life, as opposed to the neatly compartmentalized life implied by traditional service provider models.   The alternative — the chaos of multiple phone numbers, multiple email addresses, multiple IM identities and so on — is simply unacceptable.