Don't Forget the Fundamentals

Excellent post in Gigaom today: Web 2.0, Please Meet your Host, the Internet. The point of the story is that too many of the Web 2.0 companies are caught up in the software and not concerned about the 'host', in this case the Internet.

In my 'spare' time I coach my 10yo daughter's AAU basketball team. We have a great team with a lot of talent. Our travel season ended up with two championships and a 26 and 0 record. Pretty impressive. Our AAU season has not been as successful, so the head coach, Coach John, has instituted a 'back to basics' practice regimen the last two weeks. He, and any good coach, will tell you that a team with good fundamentals will always beat a team with pure talent. We're going back to the basics to re-establish those fundamentals.

The Gigaom article is similar. You can have the coolest Web 2.0 application, but if you can not handle the fundamentals of providing a service over the Internet, the equivalent of shooting and passing well, your application, whatever it is, will fail.

I feel that this is one of the reasons that Junction Networks has had so much success with the Web 2.0 version of our OnSIP Hosted PBX platform. Yes, it is Ruby on Rails, javascript and Ajax, but most importantly, it is built on a very firm foundation of servers, routers and BGP connections. To date, we have nearly a dozen BGP connections to ISPs both big and small. We have multiple, redundant servers interconnected to a mesh of routers. We have a very solid foundation upon which to build our next generation applications.