October 2007 Archives

You may have heard about the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative, headed by Nicholas Negroponte of MIT. The OLPC is centered on the XO laptop, which among other things has wireless mesh connectivity, allowing connectivity to the Internet from child to child to child optionally using solar, crank or pull chord power, both necessities in many underdeveloped countries.

So what’s the news today. Uruguay has become the first country to order 100,000 XOs, with potential to double this order and thus reach every child in this small South American country. O yes, the XO high resolution screen can be read in the bright sunshine common in Uruguay. A tremendous step forward for the children of Uruguay, and hopefully an action that will get other governments to follow suit.

John, Nortel’s CTO, wrote in his blog that one interesting aspect of the XO “is the idea of a device being designed from the start to be part of a collective of communications-enabled peers, to do everything from music creation to collaborative learning. In fact, it is pretty clear that when we look at the evolution of IT, that the interaction between the end point and the network will become less hierarchical and more ad hoc and peer to peer.”

Everyone is being connected;)

This actually appeared in the final on-line and printed program for Interop, that just finished in NYC (I spoke on a SIP panel, but more of that in the future blog). Can you imagine two less likely companies to merge?.... these guys are arch rivals!

If these companies are not merging, perhaps the industries they represent are?

Google represents a class of company that has brought innovation to the consumer market. Microsoft is a huge player in the enterprise space. During his keynote, Matthew’s Glatzbch observed that, in recent times, innovation in the consumer market has outpaced innovation in the enterprise market. I can buy that. Just look at eBay, Amazon, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, to name a few. This innovation is now coming to an enterprise near you. I’m not just talking about Google Apps and maps, but notably XML Syndication, wikis, mashups, blogs and other Web2.0 technologies. In fact, it’s already happening. SAP has a developer partner wiki with over 800,000 participants, while Pixar uses wikis in support of its film production. Is your company taking advantage of these new tools?

By the way, the keynote was a disappointment. He focused on a good message ‘Sustainable competitive advantage must be replaced by continuous innovation’ but then stopped short of presenting any view of where continuous innovation will take Google and its customers in the enterprise market;(

Just came back from being a panelist at Microsoft's OCS2007 customer seminar in NYC.

You may have heard Microsoft proclaim that the ROI for UC is >500%, pointing to some work done by Forrester. Elizabeth Herrell of Forrester explained what was behind this claim. Forrester created a 'composite company' based on 15 in-depth interviews. This composite company has 4000 employees, $900M revenues, and operates in 5 US cities and 3 overseas sites; and needs to invest $6.8M to deploy UC over 3 years, $40M in savings came from accelerated business effectiveness in various ways (a topic for a future blog) and in travel reduction. Beware- your mileage may differ!

In the partner pavilion, you would have seen the first integration of OCS 2007 with a PBX (Nortel's). You would have seen LG-Nortel IP phones (8500 series) running MSFT Office Communicator Phone Edition in various partner booths. Out of the box, you can display corporate and Outlook personal directories with presence. These have been trialed in a number of OCS betas including Virgin Megastores, Global Crossing and Columbia Sportswear. One CIO liked it so much that he replaced the Cisco phone in his office.

Over 150 enterprises, including Audi, Volvo, and Renault, took OCS2007 beta software for a test drive in production environments. What I hear from customers is that OCS has left the gate as a very stable product. What have you experienced or heard?

Finally, a thought for the day from Gurdeep Singh Pall, Corporate VP at Microsoft: "In the future (with an IM/presence exchange before every call), phone calls without subject fields will be rude". Interesting perspective. Is this a cross cultural view? Do you see this in your future?

So reads the headline in an article written by Jim Duffy, based on a presentation he received from Gartner. The graphic below has been touted by Gartner for a couple of years. The sad fact is that maybe 80% of enterprises have such a relationship with Cisco- all are paying premium prices and many are locked-in via proprietary technologies.

Who benefits- well it’s true that the enterprise has ‘one throat to choke’ as one customer called it, but is there any doubt that Cisco is the real beneficiary of the generosity of its paying customers?

What should you do if you are one of these enterprises? Is this the path to zero budget unified communications? As a minimum, it would be responsible of enterprises to ask the question: where do I want to be on the vendor influence curve?

Whether you are an American law office, an Asian manufacturer or a European bank, you are probably opinionated on this topic. What do you think?

Thought for the day. Conventional wisdom says that you will spend $4 for data network upgrades for every dollar you spend on IP Telephony. If you could decrease the cost of this upgrade by 30% (that is spend only $3), then you can take the money saved to pay for your IP Telephony system.

Tuesday, Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates launched OCS 2007. While unable to attend the big event in SF (Nortel was there big time as was our new UC partner Dell), I did attend the concurrent Microsoft Canada press event, under the Innovative Communications Alliance and as sole networking platinum sponsor of OCS events being rolled out in some 50 countries. I then participated in a Microsoft-sponsored panel podcast including Microsoft and CNIB (what was the Canadian National Institute for The Blind). CNIB experienced a lot of value from UC, particularly from the ease of use and adaptability of the advanced speech features of Exchange UM- many of their users are legally blind. The personal highlight of the day was spending some time with Bill Buxton, a Principal Researcher at Microsoft, concerned with human aspects of technology. One of the journalist I spoke to called him a Renaissance Man. Technology transparency was clearly his passion, as was mountaineering and music, his first degree. His recently released book "Sketching Human Experience" should be a great read. To illustrate the importance of human design, he referenced the (usually negative) experience many of us have with telephony area codes splitting. It's not a technology issue but a human one. We all talk of the UC user experience, but Microsoft is in a somewhat unique position to really deliver, leveraging the work done by Bill's group.

Gartner addresses this question in their annual UC Magic Quadrant, a ranking based on completeness of vision and ability to execute. The place to be is in the Leader Quadrant. The Leaders Quadrant contains vendors selling comprehensive and integrated UC solutions that directly, or with well-defined partnerships, address the full range of market needs. Vendors in the Challengers Quadrant have been placed there because of, for example, fragmented UC offers (partially due to extensive use of acquisitions), UC offers that are network centric and may make business process integration of UC difficult, or UC plans that need clarification after the vendor has gone private. Read it for yourself to see who Gartner places in the Leaders Quadrant. Hint: both companies participating in the Innovative Communications Alliance are there;)

Hyperconnected users, like you and me, have to deal with multiple devices, multiple numbers and names, multiple inboxes and multiple security environments. These challenges are being addressed by Unified Communications (UC). The UNIFIED in UC starts with the user, and should mean a common interface for different modes of communications. This is in essence the battleground being drawn between Microsoft/IBM on the one hand and Cisco on the other. One proof point: Cisco gives you two clients when interoperating with Microsoft. Not very unified? In my mind, this confirms Cisco’s strategy to push their own UC client and just loosely interoperate with Microsoft ‘as a last resort’. In fact, quite recently, Steve Ballmer and John Chambers publicly admitted that UC was an area in which Microsoft and Cisco would be highly competitive. So, when you think UC, start with the user experience.

The headshot accompanying this blog shows a clipped Cape Horn in the background. Recently I talked about Hyperconnectivity at the Government Tech Conference East in Albany. What’s the connection? At the conference I met (again) Neal Petersen, a motivational speaker, who was the first Blackman to race solo around the world. Now, that’s a sport that requires extreme endurance, can be life threatening, and yet is not suitable for TV! The rules in the Vendee Globe race, which Neal plans to enter in a few years, are simple: no land and no assistance in 60 foot monohulls designed for speed in the southern ocean (including around the legendary Cape Horn). And these skippers are hyperconnected. You can go to a web site and see a ‘dashboard’ with their exact position, speed and direction; weather conditions and forecast; access to audiostreams (“That last storm brought me to the edge”), video streams (they really are solo!), emails and chat. Now that’s Hyperconnectivity!

Have you heard that
1. Nortel and Microsoft announced that enterprises are deploying more than 430,000 licenses for our joint Unified Communications (UC) solutions?
2. One enterprise’s HVAC system has 30,000 IP addressable points?
3. iPhones at Duke University temporarily knocked out up to 30 Cisco wireless APs?
4. A Florida hospital is rolling out a communications-enabled business process to discharge patients earlier, targeting a saving of $2M for every hour advanced from its average discharge time of 6:00 pm?

What do these four have in common? They all signal a growing megatrend through which everyone and everything that can benefit from being connected to the network will be connected. We call this Hyperconnectivity. These examples are insightful. The first (Nortel-Microsoft) stems from the first anniversary of the Innovative Communications Alliance and is an industry proof point that the telecom and IT industries are indeed converging. Firstly, telephony (traditionally a vertical hardware-centric solution) is becoming a software application; secondly this application is becoming an element of a broader UC application; and thirdly UC is not just about unifying the user experience but also unifying the UC infrastructure around software. The second (networked HVAC) is just one data point. There is an explosion in network-connected devices - for example, in the realms of energy and property management, asset and location tracking, telemetry and enhanced security systems. This is enabled by low-cost sensors and actuators that can detect over 100 different physical parameters, including temperature, radiation levels, door closures, visual and audio signals and location - and that can cost-effectively transmit this information. The third (iPhone) conveys an important principle. The sheer number of devices on the network and the capabilities of these devices will complicate life for network IT professionals. The network has to be reliable and secure and not rely on well behaved devices. Scaling the network by a factor of 10 to 100 can’t be achieved within current budgets without fundamentally streamlining current networking environments. Hyperconnectivity demands simplification. The fourth illustrates in dollars and cents terms that the human delay inherent in many business processes can be streamlined through communications-enabled applications. This is all about accelerating communications to gain competitive advantage. So let’s have some fun with this blog, learn from each other and explore the challenges and opportunities of Hyperconnectivity. What do you think?