Telecom analysts have been in my face recently with an old challenge: “you can’t be a great service provider AND a great software company.”This Telecom industry belief will go the way of “Cigarette Smoking is Good for You .”

One of the reasons that the hosted IP phone system industry has not grown faster is that most players copy the old Telco mult-tier paradigm.One company builds the application, another delivers it, yet another resells it. Much gets lost in the translation, and it was all about the dial tone, not helping the customer get real impact from the applications.

But voice today is really a software application, and an important one.Every major software force – Microsoft, Google, Oracle, even the open source community – are in with both feet.A software business model will win.And the right model is Software-as-a-Service, or Cloud Computing. Some obvious benefits are clear – more sophisticated applications at lower cost, less time to get up and running, and scaling flexibility that matches a company’s growth.  Let’s face it, the main reason companies owned their own PBX’s was because there was no other option.

What a treat - I got to watch the Green Day concert in “The Pit.” We stood a few rows from Billy Joe Armstrong, on the edge of moshing. Men, and a few women and children were slamming into each other, spinning, flailing, shoving, dancing. When someone went down, a hand and a smile picked them right up. It was intense and fun, an island with its own rules amongst a sea of Madison Square Gardeners.