The opportunity to peer inside someone’s brain might be frightening, mysterious and humorous. Steve Gleave gave attendees of the 2014 Metaswitch Forum the chance to take a lighthearted and entertaining peek into his thoughts. Gleave, who is Senior Vice President of Marketing for Metaswitch, made excellent use of video and the stage to illustrate how software has decoupled from hardware and is distributed into a sort of collective brain; much like the Internet broke down the silos of intelligence.

The upshot to this decoupling is the ability to use commodity hardware, allowing operators to try new services more rapidly and to make the network meet their needs. He touches upon the idea that operators need to embrace new ways of doing business, whether it is the big public cloud or open source software, as these approaches will allow operators to try new services and quickly scale those services if they are successful.

A couple of examples from the 2014 Metaswitch Forum of applying this new approach, include:

• A virtual lab that used cloud services for 1/60th the cost of a traditional lab.
• An app that integrated voice prompts and calendar integration to allow a medical office to set up and confirm appointments without office staff interaction; this app was developed in less than two days. during the Forum

Gleave talks about the creativity that weaved its way through the 3 day conference, culminating in an homage to Michael Jackson. Gleave definitely exhibits the sort of left-brain/right-brain thinking that is increasingly important in this information, nay thinking age.