In his book The Long Tail, Chris Anderson describes a compelling future for product marketing that eschews the traditional model of product success being defined by runaway “hits” and embraces the concept of small–even tiny–vertical markets. Naturally, if each market is tiny, a profitable business based on this concept should be in a massive number of markets and have very low overhead relative to each.

As it stands right now–whether you look at traditional telecom industry products or emerging products from the open-source community–long-tail products in telecom are very rare. There are small companies producing vertical market applications, but the closest thing the big players have to anything vertically focused is hospitality packages for hotel/motel applications.

Open-source software has given us the building blocks, but so far most of what we see is a lot of effort focused on building the same kind of boxes the PBX industry produces, designed to be all things to all people. While this is not a bad thing in and of itself, it does not fully embrace the opportunities inherent in open source. The

PBX that every garden center will want to have?
My apologies to garden centers everywhere for liberties taken. As an example of a long-tail application that one might create using open source, let us look at an industry that will probably never get any specific attention from brand-name telecom manufacturers: garden centers. What are the telecom needs of a garden center? It’s easy to picture the following:

The owner of a small chain of garden centers wants to find a way to address its needs. All the (proprietary) proposals that have been received either do not address all of the needs, have a big price tag, or both. Networking hardware, licensing fees, professional services, and such are weighed against the fact that the problem is only partially solved, and the return on investment (ROI ) on the project just isn’t quite there. Within the organization, however, lurks an employee with a talent for cobbling together solutions. Using an open-source software platform, a spare server, a few hours of tinkering, and a few hundred dollars for some test equipment, the entire problem is solved. In fact, the solution is so perfectly tuned to the nature of that business that when the owner brags to one of his colleagues at a convention that they solved their telecom problems in such a manner, the colleague begs him to allow him to purchase the solution. After a few successful installs, it becomes obvious that this concept needs a table at the next trade show.

A product is born.

I’m not sure how many garden centers there are in the world, but it’s a safe bet that most towns in North America with more than 5,000 residents have at least one. Properly introduced to the market, a star is born.

Is this concept really such a big deal?
Most of the PBXs currently on the market come with an impressive array of features available to be configured, so it could be argued that this same thing can be done with a traditional PBX. The challenge comes from making sense out of the volumes of documentation and multi-level configuration menus and knowing the limitations of the platform you have chosen.

A purpose-built, vertically focused PBX becomes compelling because it does not have to offer features that its market does not require. Hotel room status is not something a garden center is ever going to need. The system does not need to be all things to all people, and design decisions do not have to balance competing interests. A coffee grinder and a fruit-juicer are built from essentially the same components, and yet each has been tuned to do one thing very well.

But there’s more to this than niche market PBXs. All over the high-tech industry, the move is away from proprietary technology in the foundational components such as operating systems and protocols. Even the telecom industry has embraced Linux and SIP, eschewing proprietary operating systems and protocols. The ethos of the open-source community is that since we are commoditizing the building blocks anyway, why not really open things up, lower the barriers to entry, and see what unfettered innovation can do with the raw materials? V

Jim Van Meggelen is a partner in Core Telecom Innovations Inc. and iConverged LLC. He lives in Toronto with his wife and three children.