April 2008 Archives

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;)

This blog is on TMCnet.

In January of 2008, TMCnet experienced 38,368,961 page views, with over 2.4 million unique visitors, each of which stayed an average for 28 minutes and 59 seconds this past month. In the past, 60% of the visitors were from outside the US. These numbers are nothing like what Google attracts with 129M unique visitors (according to Quantcast), but they are pretty big for a site that’s dedicated to a particular industry.

Without readers like you, this would not be possible.

Thank you and come back real soon;).

This is weird, but interesting!

Cna yuo raed tihs? Olny 55 plepoe out of 100 can.

i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt! \

So who needs a spell checker for IMs?