Those of us who have covered computing a long time know there is an "enterprise space," by which we mean the computer networks run by big companies, and a "telecom space," by which we mean what the phone companies use to give us our dial tone. (The illustration of IP telephony, using a gateway, is from Belarus.)

As Moore's Law has marched forward, it was inevitable that the two would merge. If telephone companies are just ISPs, then as enterprise software gets better it should, in time, be good enough to handle the demands of the phone company.

These trends meet at the residential gateway.

A gateway doesn't just deliver DSL to your home. When you have millions, or tens of millions, of boxes like this installed in several states, you're scaling beyond what we usually call "the enterprise."

That's the way the phone companies see it, anyway.

So what we have are companies that specialize in serving, say, thousands of desktops for corporations, like SupportSoft and Motive, trying to "scale up" -- not to what the DSL market is today, but to what the phone companies figure it will be in a few years, after they convince millinos of people that the way to get DSL is with a gateway that provides updated security, parental controls, and a wireless LAN throughout their homes.

When I first started looking at residential gateways, a few months ago, I was under the impression that the folks who made the gateways would also make the software carriers would use to build services with them. That's certainly the way a lot of the gateway suppliers see it.

But that's not the way it's working.

"They don’t believe support claims from CPE suppliers," said Jim Morehead of SupportSoft. His business card calls him senior director for product marketing, but he's really the guy in charge of cracking this DSL market for SupportSoft.
"But we don’t supply CPE equipment."

If companies like SupportSoft win, however, it will be a real turning point. Because SupportSoft and Motive, as I said, don't come from the telephony business, which the gateway providers have been studying so religiously. They come from the enterprise software business.

And if SupportSoft or Motive are going to be running telephone network services, can Oracle or (yes, even) Microsoft be far behind?