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.

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.

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?

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.

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.