Combine a Samsung phone with a heart rate monitor, a stride sensor in your Adidas running shoes and you get MiCoach. The phone can act as an MP3 player and tell you to run faster if you’re not keeping pace. When you get out of the shower, you can track your training program via a web site.
What if you include a sugar intake monitor for when you’re watching the game. MyCouch!?
The Royal Society's motto 'Nullius in verba', roughly translated as 'Nothing in words', dates back to 1663, and is an expression of the determination of the Fellows to withstand the domination of authority (such as in Scholasticism in the 17th century or vendor claims today) and to verify all statements by an appeal to facts determined by experiment. (Thanks Steve for this inspirational bit of history).
Ac ne forte roges, quo me duce, quo lare tuter,
Nullius addictus iurare in verba magistri.
(Horace, Epistles I.i, 1.13-14)
You shall not ask for whom I fight
Nor in what school my peace I find;
I say no master has the right
To swear me to obedience blind.
(trans. C.T. Carr)
Why this preamble?
Nortel has invested heavily in getting the facts (verified by independent third parties) on Green networking, and on performance and TCO of networking solutions.
So judge for yourself.
My father-in-law used to say (he was in video technology), “I give my customers what they need, not what they want”. He certainly wouldn’t have allowed feature creep to get in the way of delivering on this philosophy.
When we buy a car, while we may look at car magazines and day dream about owning a fully featured whatever (insert your favorite car here), many of us would narrow it down to the features we really want/need, and consider performance, maintenance costs and energy efficiency in making a purchase decision. We would be crazy to pay our hard-earned cash for features that we will never use (though there are many who go for a higher prestige to debt ratio!), and then pay again for increased gas consumption, maintenance costs or whatever.
Unfortunately, data networkers do this every day.
They buy technology based on the Cisco feature list (who have hundreds of features that seldom are used by any given customer) rather than on their feature requirements. As a result, they pay premium prices, and create unnecessary complexity which can impact performance, security, reliability and TCO. On reliability alone, it’s no secret that software complexity (multiple versions of IOS, features you don’t use, and resulting config errors) is a major contributor to failures.
One customer, Executive Director of Information Technology Services at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia, did their homework and reported “We chose a Nortel data network solution over other vendors because it delivered superior resiliency, performance and a lower total cost of ownership."
So figure out what you want, or pay a consultant to help define your needs (not just create feature lists) and then get the facts on performance, energy consumption and reliability.
With all the excitement last week at VoiceCon, you might have missed the news of the week before VoiceCon.
Microsoft and Nortel jointly announced their commitment to deliver transformed solutions in the contact center space under the Innovative Communications Alliance.
This solution from Nortel-Microsoft will not only UC-enable the contact center with Office Communicator, but will speed up customer service. Microsoft estimates that 10% of contact center calls (1 billion per year worldwide) can be expedited by reaching out to subject matter experts across the enterprise. Nortel calls this feature ‘Expert Anywhere’ which has been available using the Nortel Contact Center and MCS 5100 UC solution for some time.
Customers will be able to see proof-of-concept demonstrations of the Nortel Contact Center Suite (which Info-Tech solidly positions as #2 in the market in revenues, agents and systems) as a software application integrated with OCS 2007, by visiting our joint Collaboration Centers later this summer.
One of the strategic goals of the US Social Security Agency is “to deliver high quality citizen centered service”. Speeding up the disability claim and appeal process, while making better and more effective use of people, are two important priorities, according to the SSA’s 5-year strategic plan. It’s not uncommon for disability claims to spend over 500 days in backlog!
To meet its objectives, the SSA has established a strategic objective of “improving service through technology, focusing on accuracy, security and efficiency”. To that end, it makes extensive use of three key channels to its clients: 1600 field offices, a 55000 seat virtual contact center (employing 85% of the total staff), and its web portal.
So when the SSA embarks of a $300 million ten-year project for its Telephony System Replacement Project, it’s a significant proof point of the value of VoIP, particularly in a contact center environment. Customers with large connect centers tell us that virtualization of contact centers leveraging VoIP can lower costs, increase effectiveness and improve business agility.
What if your cell could have two numbers: one for your business use (in fact, the same as your office number), and one for your personal use? Whenever you made a business call, the called party would see your business number or name. Whenever you are on your cell, presence would show you ‘on the phone’. If you had a smart phone with a UC client, the experience would be even richer. And you could save up to 30% on your cell charges by using fewer cell minutes, bypassing roaming charges and leveraging WiFi, if you had a real dual-mode phone with cell and WiFi capabilities. Does this sound to good too be true? Check this out.
Some of the tricks of the trade?
The PBX maintains control of the mobile device, hence the ability to assign a business number to a cell phone.
When a mobile user receives an incoming call notification, the user can chose to accept the call on his/her mobile device, or re-direct the call to any number shown on the pop-up menu.
When initiating a call from the mobile phone, the user can chose to have the communications server call them first at any specified number.
When in WiFi coverage, the user can select to use VoIP bypassing the cell network altogether.
These type of UC mobility solutions deliver more efficient and affordable mobile communications that are simpler to use and manage.
May I have the envelope please for the UC Product of the Year award winners?
Here’re three of my personal favorites:
Nortel’s Multimedia Conferencing (NMC): I use it everyday and in fact have my own virtualized bridge number (as does every other Nortel employee). I’ll even use the meet-me feature on two party calls- easier than chasing each other to connect! I really like the use of IM to convey a cheat sheet of chairperson commands and to track participant involvement. I couldn’t live without it!
Microsoft’s OCS 2007: It really is a neat product, especially when integrated with our business grade telephony solutions. BTW, NMC is also integrated with OCS- a first you can see at VoiceCon next week. IBM is investing $1B to strengthen its Sametime UC solution against OCS, also with our help.
FirstHand’s mobility solutions (now part of Counterpath, a Terry Matthews initiative): These folks have some interesting mobility technology. That's why they are one of our strategic partners.
Which are your favorites?
Microsoft recently showed off a touch-screen technology (using MacOS!) for mobile devices. To solve the problem of using your finger to point to what you want on a small screen, they teamed up with Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs to develop Lucid Touch, a transparent touch sensitive screen that allows the user to see what he/she is doing by pointing from behind.
Is this neat or what?! But will it fly?
Experts tell us that the tablet PC was also a friendlier human interface, but this wasn’t enough to make it anything more than a niche solution today.
What is clear is that mobility and small screens go hand in hand.
So is the solution in something like Lucid Touch, or iPhone-style interfaces, or voice recognition or eyeball tracking?
A new survey finds that “More than seven out of 10 respondents expect VoIP to be ‘important’ or ‘extremely important’ to their organizations by late 2008.” Didn’t we see similar results even 5 years ago? Well, the facts are that less than 30% of PBX lines are IP phones. So what’s happening?
Here’s a clue. The survey continues that “More than three out of five organizations say they now view deploying unified communications at the end of 2008 as very important or “extremely important.”
So it’s less about TDM substitution, the original VoIP value prop, and more about moving the business forward and accelerating the business.
The value proposition for VoIP has now changed, to the point that VoIP is seen as a step to unified communications applications and to communications-enabled applications.
The business case is not about dial-tone, but about the business.
Earlier this week, Cisco launched its ASR 1000 (Aggregation Services Router), positioning the technology for both carriers and enterprises.
Now consider the following:
1) The press release quotes the SVP and GM of the Cisco Service Provider Group, confirming who the product was primarily designed for.
2) It's called an aggregation router. But aggregation in enterprise networks is most often provided by the public network cloud (based on MPLS, Ethernet or the Internet).
3) It's a 10+Gig box so it fits best at the WAN edge core router in large sites and in the data center, probably replacing legacy Cisco routers.
4) It's primarily built for service provider WAN Edge environments, and has been designed to support whatever the carrier's enterprise and residential customers have deployed as premise routing platforms (whether Linksys, Netgear, SMC, Multitech, Asante, USRobotics, D-Link in the consumer space, or Cisco, Juniper, Entrasys, 3com, HP, Huawei or Nortel Secure Routers in the enterprise space)
5) It runs on Linux and has a new version of IOS, not the same IOS on Cisco's ISR branch router.
For enterprises, put these together and it spells great news!
Cisco's new enterprise core router (the ASR 1000) is built for multi-vendor carrier environments, and opens the door for enterprises to look at converged branch solutions from other vendors, to realize better network performance, better reliability, and lower TCO and to unlock themselves from Cisco.
I got a comment (from someone called Tim) which I opted not to post in its original form because of its language. It was in response to my Nexus is no Lexus piece, but I suspect it was as much a comment on a number of my postings which challenged common perceptions on Cisco. In part it said: “Why are you in denial that Nortel's technology sucks and Cisco is kicking your ass.”
Our focus is not Cisco per se, but rather to be the best at solving enterprise business problems with communications technology. Our sales guys tell me that we win more often than we lose, often against Cisco, when we get ‘a chance at bats’. There are two challenges here: 1) the marketing challenge of making enterprises aware of Nortel products, software and services that can propel their business imperatives, and 2) the CXO challenge of helping CXOs realize that single vendor network-centric solutions do not necessarily give them the agility, performance and TCO structure that best meets their business needs.
Let me give you some data points:
Nortel reported 33% YoY growth in data networking and security revenues for 2007. Nortel data customers tell us that they are thus realizing improved network resilience, better network performance, greener IT and lower TCO.
According to Dell’Oro, Nortel maintained #1 leadership in worldwide total PBX (combined PBX, KTS, IP) line shipments for 4Q07 and for 2007.
Nortel announced 600 wins through its Innovative Communications Alliance UC solutions with Microsoft, which often include Nortel IP telephony, Nortel multimedia applications, business optimized networking and professional services.
Finally, we are getting tremendous CXO mindshare through our solutions for communications-enabled applications (as we have done with Orlando Regional Health), and our recently announced SOA-based Agile Communications Environment. For example, Nortel is the only telecom partner included in IBM’s Retail Integration Framework and in its Healthcare SOA-based solutions.
It’s great to be participating in a history-making transformation of a formerly great company. We’re not totally there yet, but recent customers such as the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, the New York Times, Indiana University, and Rolls Royce are getting benefits today.
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