Google is partnering with San Francisco to provide free phone numbers and voicemail boxes to homeless individuals. In my mind, this is a very insightful solution to a problem that every city in the world is facing: reaching the homeless and giving them a communications tool to allow them to help themselves. It allows the homeless to cross the ‘communications divide’ by giving them a communications identity that can be so important in receiving social services, or getting a job.

After all, Hyperconnectivity provides connectivity to all who ‘could benefit from being connected’. Thanks to the City of San Francisco and Google for their inspired leadership.

You may have seen the story about Duke University plans to cover its campus with a pre-standard 802.11n wireless network. Quoting its CIO: "We expect the campus-wide 802.11n wireless network to increasingly be the primary mode of connectivity for data access and mobility applications." This is a great example of an enterprise, implicitly embracing Nortel’s unwired enterprise vision.

The CIO of Duke went on to say that "Universities are an ideal testing ground for new technologies." So should you jump into pre-standard 11n testing ground to duke it out with this new technology?

Duke is one of the 1% of enterprises that are going with pre-standard 11n because they truly need the higher bandwidths and are willing to take the risk. They understand very well that they may have to upgrade or even replace 2500 access points, situated to provide needed coverage and often in hard to reach places (to avoid tempting students to snitch them for their own use!).

And it’s not just about 11n access points. While pre-standard adaptors exist, these are expensive for PCs, and don’t cover the need of mobile devices which today typically support 11a/b/g. A second major concern is that 802.11n access points require more power than allowed by the current PoE standard; the standard is not yet finalized and represents another possible upgrade requirement, this time in the wiring closet.

So you may want to wait for the 11n standard to be finalized and for fully interoperable product released.

The benefits of the Patient Discharge application highlighted by Orlando Regional Health in this YouTube video include financial, quality, patient safety and efficiency benefits. See for yourself. And there's no reason why other hospitals couldn't deploy this application so that others could experience it for themselves.

How many cases do you know of, in which a patient in a hospital knows they will be discharged on a particular day, as do the ward nursing staff, but the actual discharge takes place only after hours of sitting around and waiting. The problem is that the doctors required to authorize the discharge are often reached only after the nurse has made 10 to 12 calls. This has changed for the better at Orlando Regional Healthcare, through the communications enablement of clinical applications.

M. D. Anderson – Orlando, a subsidiary of Orlando Regional Healthcare, has deployed a Patient Discharge application that has shortened discharge times by 4 hours and estimates that annual revenues can be increased by as much as $11 million with a conservative increase of 6,000 discharges per year. The application saves critical time and enhances productivity, all to better serve their patients

This is an excellent example of how accelerating communications can improve costs, quality of care, patient safety and efficiency.

Well, the blogsphere is a wonderful space.

After my original Nexus is no Lexus posting of Feb 13, Brad Reese of Network World picked it up, and that generated a response from Cisco and a further comment from me.

Two highlights:
1) In November, Cisco announced VSS, touted for non-stop communications and bandwidth scalability; now it tells us that it won’t be supported on Nexus (in contrast to Nortel’s proven end-to-end architecture based on MultiLink Trunking; end to end means wiring closet to aggregation to core).
2) Energy efficiency will be the subject of lots of marketing claims and misinformation (see my last posting). Third party validation is key for enterprises to make the right decisions.

You may also want to take a look at Phil Edhom’s blog posting which was triggered by some commentary associated with the Nexus launch. In it, he suggests that it may be time for Cisco customers to demand multi-vendor solutions with better price/performance enabled partially through "merchant" silicon, and thus push Cisco to change their business/technology model (or exit the market as IBM has done in the PC space!). Take a read and draw your own conclusions.

I can take a certain amount of ‘creative’ marketing; e.g. how many vendors claim leadership in any given area. However a recent white paper* by Cisco titled “Reduce Power Consumption Through Integrated Services Delivery” is frankly an insult to the intelligence of IT professionals with its intentionally misleading logic.

Cisco’s mathematically precise, energy consumption comparison of their branch integration solution with the AVERAGE of 6 unnamed competitors, with one or more unnamed appliances (to deliver multi-service functionality), is like saying your favorite team is leading in the division of 10 teams because it has won more games than the average of 6 other teams! Totally meaningless statistic!

I agree that device consolidation in the branch is very attractive from an opex/capex perspective, and also that environmentally green solutions have both business value and societal benefit. However, I believe that enterprises shouldn't be blind-sighted by such deceptive manipulation of facts and look at alternatives. Nortel's Secure Router would be one place to start, both from a price/performance and energy efficiency basis.

I don’t particularly recommend that you read the paper, but I do encourage you to look for the facts on energy efficiencies of different solutions.

* you may have to register for free and then have access to lots of good material

According to a new survey of 900 SMB and enterprise decision-makers in the US, France and the UK, Converged Mobility (also called Fixed Mobile Convergence or FMC) is the new service SMBs are most likely to consider from a service provider. Converged mobility is the ability to make phone calls over WiFi and cellular networks via a dual-mode phone.

There are a couple of important reasons why SMBs and enterprises are interested in Converged Mobility. One is that employees of big and small companies are increasingly mobile and want a true broadband experience for voice and data wherever they are. The other is that people who pay the bills in these organizations need to manage their costs better and gain control over their mobile environments. It’s staggering- the average enterprise spends 4x more every year on mobility services than on depreciation expenses for networking gear (routers, switches PBXs and the such).

So hopefully, service providers can meet these expectations in their Converged Mobility offers. If not, there are always solutions from suppliers such as Nortel that don’t rely on service provider services.

Lexus has a reputation as a high quality, high performance, high reliability automobile. How does the recently announced Cisco Nexus 7000 stack up to its near-namesake?

High quality right? The Nexus is a new technology for the core data center, with new hardware and a new unproven OS (they call it release 4.0, but this isn’t very convincing).

At 15 Tb/s capacity, isn’t Nexus all about performance? Look again. One slot has a max I/O of 230 Gb/s and with 10 slots per shelf, my math says 2.3 Tbps is the real capacity. And it’s an energy hog in spite of Cisco’s claims to the contrary (based on what?): our high-end switches have 185-320% greater energy efficiency on a per port basis. So read the fine print.

Ok, so is it ultra-reliable for data center applications? Wrong again. It takes the Nexus 7000 4-5 seconds to recover from network failures (it doesn’t even support the much touted VSS capability). And because it has no intelligent services virtualization and limited module options, building real data centers has just got more complicated.

So if the Nexus is no Lexus, with questionable quality, performance and reliability, then what exactly is it? It’s touted as a unifying data center platform but doesn’t even support Fibre Channel? Or does it mark the beginning of the end for the Catalyst 6500?

Hyperconnectivity is with us and people take different approaches to cope with the challenges. As Mike Zafirovski, Nortel’s CEO, says “Technology has left us all with a chronic case of attention deficit disorder and we are all hard-pressed to find the time and peace for an uninterrupted read of even a newspaper.”

So how are organizations coping with these challenges?

Citizenship and Immigration Canada has asked all employees to implement a "BlackBerry blackout" between 7 p.m. and 7 a.m. and on weekends to help employees strike a better work-life balance.

US Cellular has established email-free Fridays, to reduce email overload and improve personal productivity.

Nortel has rolled out unified communications across its entire employee base of over 30,000 employees, many of whom are mobile using laptops and/or Blackberry devices. One of the key features is the ability for employees to personalize who can reach them over which device as a function of time of day. For example, on weekends, I can direct calls from my boss to my voicemail and push him a web page showing my favorite vacation spot (!), while calls from my peers ring my cell and my laptop for immediate communications

More broadly, MikeZ observes “We must harness emerging intelligent technologies such as Unified Communications and Service Oriented Architecture. Imagine what is possible when communications functions and location are integrated into a company’s business applications and workflow processes.” This takes the personal Hyperconnectivity challenge in to a enterprise-wide business opportunity.

How are you managing Hyperconnectivity? Does a professional sitting in Singapore or London, ee it differently from one in NYC?

One of our customers told us: “We have a strong focus on being environmentally friendly and helping to improve the world we live in. It is in our strategic objectives that, the environment and sustainability will be a key element of our business proposition."

Gartner estimates that companies in the U.S. spend as much as 10% of their total IT budgets on power and cooling. Most of the discussion on Green IT has been with respect to the data center, which Gartner estimates represents over 23% of global carbon dioxide emissions from ICT. But at 7%, the wiring closet should also be a target for improved energy efficiency.

But wait a second. Aren’t Ethernet switches all pretty much the same? Not according to independent lab tests by the Tolly Group. Tolly verified in their labs that Nortel Ethernet Switches are 70 to 125% more energy efficient than switches from Cisco and HP. This includes the cost of powering and cooling. "Which switches?" you ask. Check out the full report.

What does this mean for you? Either, for a given amount of power you will be able to support 70 to 125% more ports, or for a given number of ports you will require 41% to 56% less power, as well as a lower rated UPS if required. It doesn’t stop there. Less power means less heat, which can often mean the difference between using the wiring closets as they are, and the costs of upgrading wiring closets to forced air cooling or even air conditioning. If you want to understand the implications in your environment, talk to our field folks who have been equipped with an energy efficiency calculator.

What other steps can you take? As Amy Schurr reports, delayer and simplify your LAN, buy only what you need and buy energy efficient technology for your wiring closet.

How energy efficient are your wiring closets in ports/kWh?

In my Oct 29 blog, I joked about Microsoft merging with Google. Yesterday, I got a Forester Research Update stating unequivocally that “Among the four large software vendors, Microsoft has been the least active in making significant acquisitions of midsize or large vendors, and we don't expect that to change.”

Well, the cat is out of the bag surprising many experts (some call the result Micro-hoo) - $44B is hard to fathom. I personally don’t think Yahoo! is worth a penny over $43.99!

Of course, what $44B proves beyond any doubt (no news here) is that Microsoft views Google as a major threat (while Google has over 90% share of search in some EEC countries, I’m sure that Google has an eye on Microsoft as well).

Who else is on Microsoft’s competitive radar screen? Two companies come to mind: IBM and Cisco.

IBM is a key broad competitor for Microsoft, because
1) The email market is roughly split between Lotus Notes and Exchange;
2) IBM has more Sametime IM clients in production than Microsoft, though Microsoft is growing faster in this space with their Office Communicator;
3) Both companies see UC as a part of the broader collaboration space, including document handling and project management;
4) IBM’s Websphere is a clear leader in SOA frameworks, a key enabler of communications-enabled business applications; and
5) Both companies are software-centric power houses.

Cisco is a key competitor for Microsoft (and increasingly for IBM) initially in UC, because
1) Cisco is a marketing power house (as is Microsoft);
2) Cisco is leveraging its networking dominance by building vertically integrated UC systems;
3) Cisco wants to dominate the UC desktop;
4) Cisco acquired WebEx as their entry into the web collaboration space; and
5) Cisco is trying to reposition itself as a software company.

So will Micro-hoo dislodge Google in search; and will Microsoft and IBM keep Cisco off their desktops in the UC space? What do you think?

What’s it like to be the CIO for the Super Bowl? For my non-American readers, the Super Bowl is the World Cup of American Football.

Two years ago, the CIO of Ford Field in Detroit hosted a Nortel customer seminar, a couple of weeks after the 40th Super Bowl was held at his stadium (Pittsburg Steelers 21, Seattle Seahawks 10, Rolling Stones at half time, 68000 fans). When I was there, they were just ‘erasing’ the Steeler logo in the end zone.

We asked him to tell us how he and his small IT staff coped with the deluge of attention and operational challenges. It was certainly not business as usual!

First came the networks (not our type) but of the TV variety- this came in the form of 25 dual-width trucks who laid out some 500 cables though out the facility. And that was just for ABC.

Next came the US Homeland Security Department to oversee every aspect of the security, both during the preparation phase and on game night. The security perimeter had to be moved out 300 feet- Ethernet switches installed (in Kmart rubber tubs to keep them dry) for the new box office, and special AP enclosures with external antennas built for WiFi-equipped ticket takers.

An additional temporary floor was added for some 800 journalists. 1170 new phone lines had to be installed, including a dedicated line for Condalesa Rice. The Associated Press trailer alone had an Ethernet network and processed some 20,000 mega-pixel images during the event.

Planning started 18 months ahead of the event, serious implementation started 3 weeks before the event, and most everything was gone a day after the Super Bowl, including a couple of the stadium’s own Ethernet Switches!

Bullet-proof reliability, high performance and network agility were all table stakes to pull off such an event without a hitch. All for 4 hours of entertainment for something like 100 million viewers!