The thing that has made over-the-top players successful in the service layer is that they’ve dodged inertia. Because they don’t worry about standards beyond blowing a casual kiss here and there, they can expose features via APIs very quickly. If you wait for industry consensus on APIs, you’re putting yourself at the tail end of a multi-year process and then saying you’re running at market speed. I’d like to see Alcatel-Lucent open up more regarding how it will create features in Application Enablement and how quickly it can expose them using RESTful APIs.

One might ask where this consolidation would leave Cisco and Juniper, the other big players in the IP layer at least. That’s another area where NSN’s comments oversimplify. In operator trends toward procurement zones for buying, we’re seeing an attempt to create a market where a single giant vendor with a full product line can’t dominate everything.

The operators would like innovation, particularly with respect to the service layer, and they can’t get it by having everything collapse into a single giant commoditized space. But if the specialty guys like Cisco and Juniper can’t make a case in the service layer, then they can’t defend their narrower position in a commoditizing market. Thus, we could see the NSN “vision of three” being right, even if the three turn out to be different names than expects.