January 2008 Archives

Today's Juniper announcement marks their entry into the Ethernet switching space, one which is dominated by Cisco. In my view, it makes enterprises think twice about procurement strategies which rely on a single vendor (Cisco) solution, with lost agility and poorer price/performance.

That said, Juniper will be challenged on a number of fronts:
#1 Enterprise is not carrier. Juniper has been successful in taking away Cisco share in the carrier router market, but their recent entry into the enterprise router market has resulted in a 1% share (according to Dell'Oro).

Last week, I presented a keynote at ITExpo in Miami.

I joked with Rich Trehani, after he introduced me, that the conference should be renamed from “Internet Telephony Expo” to “In-transition Technologies Expo”. Why? Because there are huge things happening in the industry that will transform corporations and government agencies into Hyperconnected Enterprises (yes, the theme of this blog!).

35% respondents to CIO Insight survey identified improving business processes as a business priority in 2008, making this area top of mind only behind delivering better customer service. A similar number identified collaboration and workflow technologies as the #2 technology (behind BI) that will make the most significant contribution to their business strategy.

This bodes well for expanded unified communications solutions that include communications enablement of business processes to reduce the impact of human delay. I call this reduction in time to X, where X is whatever is important to your business (decision, service, problem resolution, revenue, lower costs).

Consolidation, centralization and virtualization of storage and processing are the generally accepted paths to increased agility, to lower TCO and to the greening of IT.

With Microsoft making its virtualization play, the focus will shift during the remainder of the decade from servers and storage virtualization in the data center to virtualization in the network, to meet business, organizational and governance requirements; for example, federations across partners and suppliers; common infrastructures across separate entities; and security, sensor and telemetry domains in a hyperconnected enterprise.

I'm not talking about just partitioning a router or firewall device. I'm talking about a new level of virtualization that allows dynamically controllable isolation of routing, security and performance of multiple logical network topologies on a single IP network.

Check out this smart cart technology for your neighborhood grocery store.

Don’t get discouraged by the date (July 2004) and do watch the video- it works for me if it helps me find what I need faster. But read on. There’s a lesson here.

If you had been at the National Retail Federation conference (this week in NYC), you would have seen a a really neat demo of the IBM Retail Integration Framework, featuring the Nortel Agile Communication Environment and the Extenda Retail application.

The demo showed what could be done across this SOA based environment leveraging a communications enabled retail application, recognizing that many sales are lost because of a time-wasting sales process.

In the demo, a customer uses her cell phone and clicks on an item (i.e. clothing) on a website, and gets information of the nearest store location via the Nortel Agile Communication Environment Location service capability.

That’s the headline in NetworkWorld after they read my last posting.

Couldn’t have said it better myself;)

I haven’t tracked Ethernet share numbers for a while. Recent Gartner Dataquest information (3Q07) on the enterprise Ethernet market surprised me: Cisco share by ports has dropped to 37%.

So what gives?
Firstly, vendors other than Cisco have collectively shipped twice as many Ethernet ports as Cisco, and so two thirds of enterprises are either just saving money or, in the case of Nortel customers, recognizing improved network resilience, better network performance and lower TCO.

Secondly, given that Cisco’s share by revenue is 73% (not a typo), Cisco customers are paying way too much to Cisco; and customers who continue blindly buying from Cisco (just because “that’s what we have always done”) will continue to unnecessarily fill Cisco’s coffers.

In my interview with Rich Tehrani of TMCnet (Hyperconnectivity Is Permeating Everything), I was asked how Google, Apple and Microsoft change the telecom space? I replied that in enterprise, of the three, Microsoft is the most significant change agent (in telecom) with its entry into unified communications as a software application. Google is certainly a company to watch and an innovation powerhouse. However, its Google Apps is still a feature-poor second cousin to Office.

Nice to talk about Hyperconnectivity in the consumer space, but let’s turn back to business.

In his blog, Michael Krigsman highlights the fact that the preliminary design of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner had the passenger in-flight internet access network connected to the plane’s control, navigation and communication systems.

This is a good example of Boeing engineers ignoring the fact that ‘just because you can do something, should you’. Sure you can use various techniques to provide logical separation between any two environments (e.g.

Another example of hyperconnectivity at home.

A friend of mine received a digital picture frame from his daughter for Christmas. A key feature, or so she thought, was the ability to wirelessly connect to a PC and display any photo or video on the PC. My friend, a computer literate environmental scientist, read the manual and concluded that the supplier was more interested in selling hosted photography services than in giving any reasonable guidance on how to make the wireless connection actually work.

Welcome to 2008 and all the best to all my fellow bloggers for the new year, wherever you are around the world.

Interesting offer from my local utility.

They will install a smart thermostat in my home for free, and will allow me to adjust my thermostat settings over the Internet. In exchange, the utility may remotely raise the temperature in my home by one or two degrees for a brief period of time, on the hottest weekday afternoons during the summer, when the use of air conditioners is greatest.

At the same time, the utility will be replacing my electric meter with a smart one to enable the future implementation of time-of-use pricing.

Is Hyperconnectivity hitting home with you?