British Telecommunications Plc is having another tilt at earning global recognition for its home-grown intelligent software technology, and launching its Zeus development toolkit on an open-source product.
Like most major telcos, BT makes significant investments in R&D every year, most of which is dedicated to discovery innovative technology with which to tweak its own network infrastructure. However, from time to time, BT’s Adastral Park Research center near Martlesham in Eastern England, throws up a real novelty with wider applications which the company attempts to pursue on a commercial basis.
Zeus is a recent example of this, and has been touted as a fundamental building block for agent-based applications for several years, but with limited success. Although Zeus, which draws on intelligent agent technology used to manage BT’s own very complex national networks, has earned plenty of respect, the telco has struggled to win sales in the face of slicker marketing from agent specialists, like fellow UK firm, Autonomy Plc.
So why not try the open source route: give the tools away and wait for the maintenance and support revenues to role in? It’s a little premature to write-off BT’s chances entirely, but it’s also still difficult not to suspect that, in this context, the open source route looks suspiciously like the last resort of a commercial failure.
BT claims that Zeus’ particular strength is providing applications developers with the tools to implement teams of intelligent agents which can work in concert. This ability, the company claims, makes it ideal for workflow management, broadband network management, and multi-agent trading systems for e-commerce. And, of course, because it is a telco-driven product, Zeus is geared to the needs of network users, including those using mobile systems.
But is Zeus any more ideal for any of this uses now that is open source? Probably not. Still, now at least interested developers will at least not have to pay to find out whether Zeus is everything BT says it is. They can download it free from www.labs.bt.com/projects/agents/zeus.
