The Hyperconnected Enterprise

The Swedish Consumer Ombudsman has announced that wireless operators in Sweden must stop making bandwidth claims that don't align with what the customer will get.

For example, a service with a theoretical bandwidth of 7.2Mbit/s (including all sorts of overheads, will now be marketed as having "a practical maximum speed of 6M bps."

This "practical" claim is not all that practical, since it assumes optimal conditions (no other users and best location).

While this is a step in the right direction, at least for enterprises, how about a minimum committed rate at peak hours, reflecting some sort of engineering criteria?

This would allow IT to start making choices on price/performance.

Theoretical and practical bandwidths don't do it for me.

O yes. Happy Canada and USA days!

At first I thought this was neat, but then I thought about it some more.

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This fits into a standard wall junction and includes
> four 10/100 Ethernet ports (why so many?)
> a pass-through standard phone jack and
> a WiFi access point.

All I would ever want is good WiFi access.

But HP's WiFi offer has no 802.11n, just a/b.

At US$349, you might want something with longer life.

That was Coke's slogan back in the 70s.

With 1.6B consumer servings per day, Coca-Cola is always looking for new ways to serve their customers.

Enter Freestyle Coke, a hyperconnected vending machine that can give you 100 drink choices, while giving Coke better on-line inventory control and first hand market research.

How? By embedding 30 flavor cartridges (example that come to mind: caffiene, sugar, fruits) that network back to HQ.

Is a hamburger dispenser next?

The Nortel User Association held its annual conference, Global Connect, in Pittsburgh earlier this month, just before the 7th and final game for the Stanley Cup between the Pittsburgh Penguins and Detroit Red Wings in Detroit

Henry Dewing of Forrester Research provided a well-balanced view on this event on his blog.

Henry observed that "customers wanted to compare them (Nortel) to the Pittsburgh Penguins wondering whether they could pull off one more win to take the Cup."

Ánd they did!

Blackberry is tops in 3 of the top 5 smartphone categories.

Why such success in the enterprise hyperconnected world?

Three reasons why it beat out the iPhone:

1) Enterprise fit, apps and security- R3 of iPhone will narrow the gap.
2) Carrier support: Blackberry is available from all top 4 US carriers, while iPhone is only available from AT&T. Remember that many enterprises have a preferred wireless provider, so this is a big deal for those that aren't with AT&T.
3) Blackberry is a more mature product in a market that they have created (at least in enterprise).

As the smartphone market matures, driven by consumers, expect to see more competition in the enterprise segment.

I attended a Canadian Parliamentary Finance Committee yesterday at which Mike Zafirovski, the CEO of Nortel, defended bonuses for execs, and Nortel Pensioners presented their case. One headline read "Zafirovski faces MPs, angry Nortel pensioners".

You can read Zafirovski's opening remarks yourself.

The stated perception from Nortel Pensioners was that all of Nortel will be sold off. Mike Zafirovski didn't correct this perception.

Nortel therefore appears to have abandoned the option of taking parts of Nortel out of creditor protection as many companies have done (e.g. Air Canada); preferring to sell off Nortel to other companies (e.g. SEN) or to private investors.

The Pensioner concerns with the options being pursued by Nortel were that the pension fund would be converted to annuities (at currently very low rates), and be put low on the list of creditors. Hence, they were pushing to make pensions a high priority creditorthrough legislative action (as has been done in other countries) and to keep the pension fund solvent with its investments in equities and bonds.

What form Nortel takes going forward is perhaps less of a concern to customers, who want solid solutions from a company with a vision and strong future.

A few years back, a psychiatrist at King's College London University, monitored the IQ of workers in 80 clinical trials.

What he found is that workers distracted by phone calls, e-mails and text messages suffer a greater loss of IQ than a person smoking marijuana or losing a nights sleep. That's the down side of hyperconnectivity.

The upside exists in unified communications.

In simplifying and integrated a person's communications environment, UC can be viewed as an IQ enhancer, as compared to today's environment where employees need to juggle messages and work.

The CEO of Siemens Enterprise Networks has left Siemens. The new interim CEO is from Gores Group, the private equity firm that owns SEN..

No reason has been given, but could it be due to a disagreement on details associated with potentially acquiring Nortel's enterprise business?

And if that happened, would this open the door for Joel Hackney, Nortel Enterprise's current President, to head the combined business?

I have already suggested this might be an interesting marriage.

Five months have passed without a word from Nortel.

Maybe Nortel is waiting the full nine months to announce who the father will be for its Enterprise business? I hope not.

Nortel just released Release 2 of their Agile Communication Environment, communications integration middleware that can help create communications enabled applications across multivendor communications environments. In my mind ACE represents one of the crown jewels of Nortel technology.

Multivendor Hotdesking is highlighted as a key new capability, which had been developed for HSBC as a lead user.

Of course, single vendor hot desking is a feature of most IP Telephony systems, allowing users to walk up to any IP phone. log-in and take it over.

What's very interesting about the Nortel solution is that it can work across IP telephony and UC vendors and even include desktop video systems (like those from Tandberg), a key differentiator.

Nortel has adaptors for Cisco, IBM Sametime, and Micrsoft OCS, but needs to address Avaya and Siemens environments to address a much broader market.

Maybe one of these will become reality, sooner rather than later, if Nortel Enterprise is acquired.

Who would have predicted a year ago that GM would be in Chapter 11? Nothing is forever.

Cisco too will fall... someday.

What might bring it to this state?

Users might revolt against paying premium prices for locked-in solutions. This scenario is more likely to be driven by economic realities than any altruistic sentiment.

Cisco's dominance in Switching and Routers may suffer from commoditization and low cost suppliers. Just look at HP's and Huawei's growth.

Software may win out over hardware. This one is most intriguing to me, as Cisco is increasingly butting heads with IBM and Microsoft.

This is not being alarmist (Cisco's financial position is sound today), but a reminder that adaptive corporate strategies have to win out over corporate greed.

Let the debate go on.

Both GM and Nortel are in Chapter 11, but what else can we observe.

Firstly, GM has many manufacturing facilities and ecosystem suppliers in North America; Nortel out-sourced manufacturing years ago.This has attracted political action on behalf of GM.

Secondly, both have been spread too thin, in terms of brands for GM and products for Nortel. This has contributed to lower competitiveness.

Thirdly, Nortel has been, in general, better aligned with customer needs. This customer focus is a plus for Nortel, while changing the Detroit culture is a major challenge for GM.

Finally, in both cases, company executives have their hands full and are not in full control of their destiny.

That's the name of what is the most technologically advanced row boat ever built.

"For what purpose?" you might ask.

Last January, Oliver Hicks, a Brit, set off solo from Tasmania on his 18,000 mile (29,000 km) journey around the world. If completed (Oliver is now in New Zealand!), this will be a world first and take between 18 and 22 months to complete.

Hicks is hyperconnected via email, Picasa, YouTube, Friend Connect and Blogger, Google Analytics, and Google Moderator, the latter to field questions from the many hundreds of people following his adventure. This is all done through his laptop, two PDA's, and three satellite phones, powered by a wind generator, solar panels and a fuel cell.

Row, row, row your boat...

Nova Spivack, technologist and cofounder of one the first Internet companies (EarthWeb in 1984), spoke earlier in the month at the Future in Review FiRe conference in San Jose, CA.

He made the following observation: "We're moving from a web that was like a refernce library to a web that's increasingly like radio or TV".

Right on. This reflects a move from the Internet being a bunch of pages you surf to a set of self-describing objects that you 'tune into in terms of interest areas'.

This is the world of the semantic web, and will create opportunities for new semantic web apps, such as Nova's own twine.com, which has been described as your own artificially intelligent personal web assistant.

The semantic web technology has been talked about for several years, but the question is when will it become mainstream.

The "consumer effect' is hitting the enterprise.

This is happening in multiple ways and goes well beyond reaching out to consumer customers through the devices and applications they use, or accepting the iPhone as an enterprise mobility tool..

For example, music players such as iPods (and features of cell phones) are becoming important employee educational and communications tools. Netbooks are becoming business tools squeezing in on laptops. Social networking which had its beginnings in the consumer space are likewise entering the enterprise space, and are increasingly being viewed as part of the UC space. What's interesting is that in many cases, employees want to the use these capabilities for both business and personal use.

Bottom-line: IT needs to understand that the personal and business identities of employees are blurring and that it must accept the inevitability of the consumer effect, and address security and other policy issues associated with it.

Opportunity knocks to lower costs, and increase employee effectiveness.

It's not a new cell phone or music player, but a DNA barcoder reader you might be able to actually buy in 10-15 years!

Why would you want one?

Let's say you are mushroom picking, and want to know whether a particularly delicious looking specimen you have found will kill you. Or you are fishing, and catch a fish that you are unfamiliar with. Or are an amateur botanist and want to identify a flower. Just scan a speck of the mushroom, or fish or flower with the DNA barcoder, which will search a database on the Internet and display the information you need and more!

What you have just done is identified a species by analyzing a short DNA sequence from a uniform locality on the genome. The science of DNA barcoding was pioneered only 6 years ago at the University of Guelph, but has since gone global under the international Barcode of Life (iBOL) project.

Miniaturization and hyperconnectivity will make this an indispensable tool... and toy. I'm told that the technology exists... but first we need an integrated desktop unit!

The applications of this technology are truly endless.