Telecoms vs datacoms: the battle is on for the converged high ground

You've heard the hype about convergence. You believe there's a serious business case to be made in favour of pushing voice and data down one pipe. The big question now is: which sort of company do you turn to? Should it be a datacoms player or a telecoms specialist?

According to Martin Hewitt, MD of Jaguar Communications, the datacoms companies are all set to win the race simply because the telcos do not have the right staff. "To be blunt, the problem is training. Engineers at telcos are simply not up to the job of installing a converged network. They don't have the training or education. If they did, they would work for more money at a data networking company."

That's a fairly damning condemnation of the telcos' skill sets. But how about the telecoms equipment manufacturers? Even Terry Hopcroft, director of solutions marketing at Nortel Networks, agrees that there's a disparity between the working environment in telcos and the datacoms players: "We need some convergence in terms of salaries and employment conditions between telecoms and data engineers to start with."

However, the distinction between telecoms equipment manufacturers and the players in the datacoms arena is shrinking. Many telecoms companies have bought in the missing expertise by acquiring a data specialist.

Mark Purdom, international marketing manager, core systems division at Ascend, says: "That is exactly why Lucent spent $20bn on buying us."

Perhaps, though, this is merely cosmetic change. David Hall, analyst at Datamonitor, says that although an acquisition like Nortel's of Bay or Lucent's of Ascend offers a quick fix, "if you buy someone, you end up with expertise on both sides, rather than one smooth surface".

Hall also claims the market is likely to be fairly evenly divided between telcos and data companies. "The telco market will be squeezed in the next few months and this will, to some extent, push [telcos] into the converged network market," he claims.

Nortel's Hopcroft stresses that the implementation of converged networks is a major culture change, and the challenges are as much organisational as technical. As a result, customers should choose their supplier with care. "Customers need to have faith in the company to manage issues surrounding transition as much as the purely technical issues."

Hopcroft also believes the internal structures of end user organisations are equally significant, and tend to favour the datacoms industry right now. "Customers at the moment are putting a unified structure in place internally. They need to put in the organisational changes first. Within these restructured departments, the data guys tend to have more management responsibility - although the telecoms people still have an influence."

Hopcroft believes the converged market will favour the top three - Nortel, Lucent and Cisco.

But Ascend's Purdom sees the whole debate as a bit of a red herring, claiming that converged networks will not be an issue for enterprises for the next two or three years. He claimed that the main market for such networks at the moment, apart from the carriers, are companies with no IT structure in place, and small firms.

Purdom says: "If you do the maths, and work out the operating costs for a unified LAN, it is not actually clear that you would see savings once you include legacy equipment, training and installation."

However, David Hall at Datamonitor disagrees - but has another caveat for anyone lured by the hype: "These networks do offer serious cost savings in terms of toll bypass and only having to manage one network. But the products have been proved in the labs rather than in reality."

So, it's early days in the battle for the hearts and minds of the end user tempted to follow a converged path. The wise money is on a 'wait and see' policy - it's not always prudent to be on the bleeding edge. But once the dust has settled on the technology itself, the datacoms companies may find themselves sitting pretty - unless the telecoms outfits manage to attract the right staff with the right skills.