The Hyperconnected Enterprise

We all accept that hyperconnectivity is coming- everyone who can benefit from being connected will be connected using whatever device he or she is using. But in fact, it's happening faster than we expected.

A Nortel-funded IDC survey of nearly 2400 information workers around the world found that 16% of them termed 'hyperconnected users' (with another 36% of 'highly connected users' waiting in the wings), rely on and expect a range of mobile, unified communications and social networking capabilities, in their work environments. But user pull for personal productivity tools is not sufficient for a business case to invest in unified communications and related technologies.

What is clearly needed is a business push for these types of group and enterprise productivity solutions, based on opportunities to accelerate the business.

Help is at hand. These same hyperconnected users can act as agents of change within the enterprise to rationalize user pull and business push for unified communications.

I just came back from a 3 day customer session we held in Vancouver, where we had a chance to discuss all aspects of networking and communications with some 20 Nortel customers from across North America. One of the topics was around the training requirements associated with introducing Nortel into a Cisco data network, in some cases, funding this transition by avoiding the Cisco energy tax.

One of the customer examples we gave was of a news agency with 3 newspapers in a major US city that replaced their Cisco network with Nortel. During the RFP process, the customer compared proposals from Nortel and Cisco, and chose Nortel. Cisco came back not once but three times (including proposing 4500’s in the wiring closets to meet the need for redundant power), but the preferred solution and the one selected was the Nortel one (we stayed with our original design proposal). Some of the reasons included price/performance, reliability, energy efficiency and TC0.

At first, the CCIEs on staff expressed concern of the new skills required to engineer and operate a Nortel solution. They bluntly said “why change to a new technology platform?” Over 18 months since the decision was made, the CCIE concerns have not materialized. With a couple of days of incremental training, CCIEs were able to apply their extensive skills in Ethernet, IP, routing, VLANs etc to become highly proficient in the chosen Nortel solution.

Bottom-line, reject Cisco FUD that there are huge training hurdles with moving to a Nortel solution.

Late last year, I did a podcast on the day of the OCS2007 launch at a music studio in Toronto. This is part of Microsoft’s Canada monthly in-depth look at issues relevant to IT executives and managers across a range of Canadian industries. This podcast is entitled “The changing landscape of Unified Communications” and includes Vicki Mains of CNIB (formerly the Canadian National Institute for the Blind and a mutual customer), Erin Elofson of Microsoft, and myself. It’s 30 minutes, which hopefully will engage you during a good portion of your commute.

Something for your next commute. Drop me a not if you have any comments.

Sorry only available in English;(

that Nortel data solutions are 50% more energy efficient. Green may be in, but Cisco products carry a huge energy tax.

Cisco’s response #1: market green and hope the customer doesn’t see the Cisco energy tax on his bill.
Cisco’s response #2: start redesigning its products (this probably won’t be just another upgrade).

What’s the customer to do #1: don’t get distracked by Cisco marketing
What’s the customer to do #2: fund your data and/or UC evolution through energy tax savings
What’s the customer to do #3: get the facts and do the math

Hyperconnectivity is a megatrend whereby everything and everyone that can benefit from being connected will be connected.

The down side is that things that don’t deliver business benefit can also be connected.

And today marks the thirtieth anniversary of spam- it first appeared on the ARPAnet on May 3 1978, as an over exuberant entrepreneur tried to promote his products by sending out an unsolicited bulk emailing.

The term ‘spam’ appeared some 15 years later (15 years ago) and has been highly disruptive to residential and business users alike.

According to Spamhaus, 90% of email today is spam with a mere 200 spammers accounting for 80% of this number!

Wouldn’t we all love to take away the privileges of hyperconnectivity from these 200? Unfortunately spam is one cost of openness that hyperconnectivity implies.

The implication for the industry is that there will be a continued requirement for intelligent network and application layer technologies within a layered defense architecture, to counter spam and its relatives (e.g. IM spams sometimes called SPIT).

Great news for enterprises, who now have a proven low risk choice to the guerilla.

Sure some of these have been loyal customers since the Bay days and are now moving to the latest and greatest.

But most are swapping out their incumbent vendor (often Cisco) in favor of better performance and resilience, lower energy consumption and/or lower TCO. Yet others are bringing a second vendor (Nortel) into their networking environment as part of a dual vendor strategy. In both these cases, interoperability with the installed base is table stake.

By way of example, the CIO of Fred Weber, a construction and materials supply company in Missouri, whose incumbent data vendor had not been Nortel, said “Quite frankly, we were dead set on another solution, but we listened to Nortel and we were very pleased with what they were able to provide.”

So get the facts and make the best choice for your business.

In an earlier blog, I echoed Gartner’s recommendation: Beware the Single Vendor as Trusted Advisor, referencing their Vendor Influence Curve.

I’m here at Interop and customers are getting the facts (verified by independent third parties) on Green networking (50% less energy consumption), on performance (20x better), on reliability (7x the resilience) and on TCO (50% reduction) of our networking solutions.

One customer (an educational institution) apparently is stopping an order for $2M of Cisco gear when they heard this story!

The bottom-line is that enterprises need to do due diligence and look at alternatives to Cisco in the data space. That’s exactly what this institution is doing.

I was being interviewed by the press a while back and was asked about best UC best practices. That got me thinking and I came up with the following top ten:

Best Practice #1: Develop a Vision and Strategy for Enterprise Transformation. It’s no longer just about how work is done, but how business processes are organized and accelerated for increased effectiveness.

Best Practice #2: Develop a UC business case around how UC accelerates time to X (X= revenue, service, service, product, decision) and business processes in general. This requires you to engage with business owners to understand which user communities and application environments to target.

Best Practice #3: Converge telecom with the desktop for a unified client experience. The telecom and IT industries are converging, as are user expectations.

Best Practice #4: Get control of your mobility environment and drive for business advantage. The future is mobility, but your mobility costs are escalating.

Best Practice #5: Partner with suppliers that will help you unify your UC infrastructure. UC has to be about both client and infrastructure unification, for maximum benefit and lowest TCO.

Best Practice #6: Add multimedia applications to your UC system based on business opportunities. The core of any UC system is IM/presence and telephony, but rich collaboration comes through multimedia applications.

Best Practice #7: Address needs to accelerate key business processes through communications enabled applications. Human latency in existing processes is impacting customer service and increasing business costs.

Best Practice #8: Establish a SOA-based communications enablement environment that will improve agility, accuracy and speed. Vertically integrated single vendor systems will not deliver the agility you need.

Best Practice #9: Invest in critical network infrastructures to deliver consistent quality of experience for UC users and the new generation of applications. With growing enterprise reliance on UC and communications-enabled applications, you need to get the facts about performance, energy efficiency and TCO.

Best Practice #10: Partner with suppliers that have the strategic partnerships in place and the solution breadth and services to plan, deliver and operate solutions that best fit business objectives.

Make sense? What's missing?

The Hyperconnected enterprise is going to be largely made up of all forms of wireless access, supported by a high capacity optical backbone (optimized on Ethernet and IP, in both cases, across private and public network domains). Within the enterprise, the challenge is network simplification, while delivering improved network resilience, better network performance and lower TCO.

In the public network space, you may not be particularly tracking backbone networking technologies being rolled out by service providers. You’ve likely heard of MPLS, but the reality is that, with Hyperconnectivity in enterprise and similar developments in the consumer market (e.g. mobile video, multimedia gaming etc), MPLS networks are becoming way too complex. Provider Backbone Transport (PBT) is one of the key technology responses to these challenges.

BT and Southern Light agree with me.Why? PBT delivers the same predictability and resiliency of traditional SONET-based networks, and is based on a technology you’re more than familiar with: Ethernet. It can be used as the foundation of an end-to-end service (e.g. in metro areas) or as an on-ramp to MPLS WANs.

As I have said many times, Hyperconnectivity demands network simplification, with increased real-time performance, scalability and reliability. PBT is an important part of the equation, as are 4th gen wireless technologies such as 801.11n and WiMax.

In fact, some of our larger enterprise customers are looking at what PBT can do for them in their internal networks!

Drew Martin, Sony Electronics CIO, recently talked about his experience during the October wildfires that threatened the company’s San Diego area HQ and data center (the building only sustained minor damage). One of his takeaways from his experience was that he wished he had a reverse-911 system in place, much the way his local school district was able to communicate school closures to all parents.

I hadn’t heard the term reverse-911 before, but it’s very much of a class of applications that can be communications enabled to speed up processes.

Reaching out to all employees during a natural disaster is hopefully a once in a blue moon scenario, but what about reaching out to emergency response teams and directing those that are closest to the emergency and have the requisite skills and equipment to deal with it in the most effective fashion? In a hospital environment, code reds happen relatively frequently.

With the proliferation of devices and communications modes (telephony, IM, email) and introduction of location tracking capabilities and presence, notification services can become much richer and more intelligent than ‘brute-force’ telephony-centric reverse-911 systems today.

A key enabling technology is a SOA-based communications enablement framework, such as Nortel’s recently announced Agile Communications Environment which in its first substantiation is based on IBM’s Websphere, which can interoperate with multiple vendors’ communications systems across enterprise and carrier environments.

Notification is but one important class of communications-enabled applications. Do you have a plan in place to accelerate your business?

During the 90s, there was a lot of discussion on how IT should be (re-)organized to handle IP telephony.

With the emergence of software-centric unified communications, tightly integrated not only with email, calendaring and directories, but also with desktop applications and over time with business processes, it will be very interesting to watch how CIOs organize around this inevitability.

In fact, organizations designed for the 90’s could be an encumbrance to accelerated acceptance of UC and communications-enabled applications.

IT convergence changes not only how work is done, but how work is organized.

So where do you see going organizationally in 2008?

With Hyperconnectivity, the diversity of traffic on enterprise networks expands significantly and includes latency- and bandwidth-intensive applications associated with person-to-person, person-to-machine and machine-to-machine communications.

Delivering end-to-end real-time performance for UC users and for time-sensitive sensor/actuator applications is a key challenge. Time-sensitive applications must operate within an end-to-end delay window (150 msec for human communications, but potentially much less for telemetry). These applications can’t tolerate packet loss because there’s no time to retransmit.

This drives the deployment of comprehensive traffic-management mechanisms (including QoS) to ensure that real-time traffic always receives priority treatment even in the presence of data traffic bursts. While achieving this across the bandwidth-rich LAN environment is relatively straight forward, doing it across WLANs additionally requires low-latency seamless-roaming and application-based load balancing across APs. Achieving real-time performance across the WAN mandates the elimination of speed bumps when crossing the MAN and the WAN by leveraging technologies such as carrier-grade Ethernet.

Is your network ready to support a broad range of real-time applications?

You’re wandering around Second Life and need to get some info, so you dial a 1-800 number for help. A contact center agent or expert gets "teleported" into the virtual world on-demand in response to your need.

That’s the scenario described by Phil Edholm, the Nortel Enterprise CTO, in his blog, based on technologies in the our Contact Center 6.0 application, to integrate real people into Second Life as on-demand avatars.

This is just another example, that your customers want to have the flexibility to interact with you over whatever channel they want, whether it be in person, over the Internet, over the phone and now even from Second Life!

Hyperconnectivity creates new challenges in emergency situations.

Did you hear about the lady in Chicago who placed a 911 call from one of a two building small campus. She died when the first responders went to the wrong building!

This podcast features Mark Fletcher, who is the chairman of the PBX/Multi-Line Telephone System technical subcommittee of the National Emergency Number Association (NENA). It’s 16 minutes long and could save your life;)