Solving Unsolvable Problems (Part 3): Committing considerable resources, with uncertain returns

If you choose to tackle a family of protocols (e.g. Webmails), you have to develop network intelligence capabilities for the most important protocols in this family, otherwise your solution will ineffective or incomplete (think of traffic optimization or cyber security applications). In addition, the total number of applications and protocols increase continuously (e.g. 50,000 applications are now available for the iPhone), and very few protocols ever disappear…

For a company whose core business is not network intelligence technology, this translates into high costs of entry and ever-rising investments. To make things worse, end customers of turn-key solutions may not appreciate the importance of continuous protocol updates and the amount of work required to keep the solutions current. This means that a solution vendor could end up investing considerable resources for which and end customer does not perceive high value and therefore may not be ready to pay… 

Jerome