May 2008 Archives

1. You e-mail the person who works at the desk next to you.
2. Your reason for not staying in touch with friends and family is that they don ' t have e-mail addresses.
3. Leaving the house without your cell phone is now a cause for panic.
4. You get up in the morning and go on line before getting your coffee.
5. You start tilting your head sideways to smile. : )
6. If given the choice of one item, you take your phone, not your keys, if you are to be gone for 24 hours.

In fact, in a recent survey, 38% of respondents would do just what you did in item 6.

Hyperconnectivity is coming faster than we had imagined. For my perspective on what this all means for enterprise, I invite you to view and 5-part video podcast I created.

Enjoy.

If I have said it once, I have said it a hundred times….”Hyperconnectivity is a megatrend whereby everyone and everything that can benefit from being connected to the network will be connected.”

And that includes enterprises themselves!

After all, every enterprise has suppliers, customers, and partners, who are all part of an expanding ecosystem Increasingly, work will be performed wherever it can be most cost effectively done, with much less regard to the organization of the doer (employee, partner, contractor, open source contributor, whoever). This is very different than the vertically integrated industries of the last century.

What will help make this happen? One word: FEDERATIONS.

Federations are all about extending trust across domains.

Federated unified communications systems will enable effective real-time collaboration anytime, anywhere over any media; and federated SOA-based cross domain business processes will accelerate the delivery of products and services to customers.

Federations will not only impact how work is done, but how it is organized across, what some call, the virtual or Hyperconnected enterprise.

It’s not as far out as you think. For example, Nortel and Microsoft are federated today when it comes to unified communications, selectively exposing presence and directories across these two companies.

Ever since Interop, there’s been a lot of buzz in the industry about the Cisco Energy Tax.

Customers have asked me: “Why are Cisco routers and switches such energy hogs?”

The answer lies in how Cisco has architected their products, driven by their network-centric strategy built on IOS. IOS has evolved into a Swiss army knife of functionality, with literally hundreds of features that most enterprises have little use for (I discussed this ‘Feature Creep’ in an earlier posting). Anyone still running DECnet or IPX in their networks?

To deliver on this strategy, Cisco tends to develop their own custom silicon (processors) in many/most of their product designs, with apparently little consideration of energy efficiency. In contrast, Nortel chooses to leverage off the shelf merchant silicon, without sacrificing features or performance. Merchant silicon not only has a smaller energy footprint, but is also on an accelerated price/performance curve.

There is no quick fix to Cisco’s energy woes. Expect Cisco to rev up their marketing machine, with their CEO telepresenting how energy efficient Cisco is (or would like to be!) on every occasion. .

But there is a better way for customers.

Instead of waiting for Cisco to re-architect their products and deliver this to you as a rip-and-replace solution, you can pay 50% less on your energy bill for 2-3 years, AND get better performance and reliability.

“The boundary between work and personal connectivity for the hyperconnected is almost nonexistent. Two-thirds use text or instant messaging for both work and personal use. More than a third use social networking for both. “

This comes from a white paper resulting from a Nortel-funded IDC information worker survey.

This trend is hard to fight (and would be counter-productive) as in many environments, information workers are encouraged to take their work home, and to respond to business-related queries off-hours.

The implications are clear. Personal use and IT support policies will need to be adjusted to reflect this new reality. Security will likewise need to reassessed both in terms of networking and business/customer data retention.

What can you do? Well, for example, technology exists today that allows your employees to publish only their work numbers and still be accessible on their cells; cell numbers can be reserved for personal use.

We had a very interesting day with a number of journalists, all heavy bloggers, who visited us at the Nortel R&D worldwide headquarters in Ottawa.

The focus of the day was demos of some of our pre-product innovative/incubation R&D in areas such as virtual reality conferencing, embedding communications into business apps, and Web 2.0 and beyond.

What became obvious to the group was that Nortel competencies in real-time communications, scalability and reliability, had high value in turning virtual reality technologies into potentially much more user friendly and more powerful business tools.

A recurring theme was that "There is no I, there's only we", in Andy Lippman's words, who joined us for a good part of the day. He's mid-way through his sabbatical as a visiting fellow at Nortel from MIT. "Second Life doesn't solve business problem, this does" quipped one of our guests.

Solving business problems is the theme of a white paper I recently wrote on Hyperconnectivity and enterprise transformation.

The first posting resulting from this visit came from Rich Tehrani of TMCnet fame.

Perhaps you've seen this ad?

Central to our efforts to give you the facts on the Cisco energy tax as compared to Nortel solutions, is the Nortel Energy Efficiency Calculator. This calculator is an engineering planning tool, that not only addressees networking in the data center (the hottest area in Green IT discussions), but also the converged LAN/WAN including IP phones and call servers.

I played with it and it’s a very neat tool..

For example, it includes average industrial energy costs from every US state and from various regions around the world, and automatically calculates heat generation in BTUs and CO2 emissions.

It allows you to assess the relative efficiencies of Nortel and Cisco in wiring closets with a mix of PoE and non-PoE environments. To illustrate the thought that went into the design of the tool, you can also specify the average utilization of phones, since the power consumption is different when you’re talking or not talking. In this regard, a contact center has very different power consumption than a general business office.

One customer case we modeled, for a building with 2500 IP phones, resulted in a 5-year saving of over $630,000 by going with a Nortel solution over one from Cisco.

So get the facts and invite Nortel to the table to assess how the Cisco energy tax is impacting you and what tax avoidance strategies you can use.

We all accept that hyperconnectivity is coming- everyone who can benefit from being connected will be connected using whatever device he or she is using. But in fact, it's happening faster than we expected.

A Nortel-funded IDC survey of nearly 2400 information workers around the world found that 16% of them termed 'hyperconnected users' (with another 36% of 'highly connected users' waiting in the wings), rely on and expect a range of mobile, unified communications and social networking capabilities, in their work environments. But user pull for personal productivity tools is not sufficient for a business case to invest in unified communications and related technologies.

What is clearly needed is a business push for these types of group and enterprise productivity solutions, based on opportunities to accelerate the business.

Help is at hand. These same hyperconnected users can act as agents of change within the enterprise to rationalize user pull and business push for unified communications.

I just came back from a 3 day customer session we held in Vancouver, where we had a chance to discuss all aspects of networking and communications with some 20 Nortel customers from across North America. One of the topics was around the training requirements associated with introducing Nortel into a Cisco data network, in some cases, funding this transition by avoiding the Cisco energy tax.

One of the customer examples we gave was of a news agency with 3 newspapers in a major US city that replaced their Cisco network with Nortel. During the RFP process, the customer compared proposals from Nortel and Cisco, and chose Nortel. Cisco came back not once but three times (including proposing 4500’s in the wiring closets to meet the need for redundant power), but the preferred solution and the one selected was the Nortel one (we stayed with our original design proposal). Some of the reasons included price/performance, reliability, energy efficiency and TC0.

At first, the CCIEs on staff expressed concern of the new skills required to engineer and operate a Nortel solution. They bluntly said “why change to a new technology platform?” Over 18 months since the decision was made, the CCIE concerns have not materialized. With a couple of days of incremental training, CCIEs were able to apply their extensive skills in Ethernet, IP, routing, VLANs etc to become highly proficient in the chosen Nortel solution.

Bottom-line, reject Cisco FUD that there are huge training hurdles with moving to a Nortel solution.

Late last year, I did a podcast on the day of the OCS2007 launch at a music studio in Toronto. This is part of Microsoft’s Canada monthly in-depth look at issues relevant to IT executives and managers across a range of Canadian industries. This podcast is entitled “The changing landscape of Unified Communications” and includes Vicki Mains of CNIB (formerly the Canadian National Institute for the Blind and a mutual customer), Erin Elofson of Microsoft, and myself. It’s 30 minutes, which hopefully will engage you during a good portion of your commute.

Something for your next commute. Drop me a not if you have any comments.

Sorry only available in English;(

that Nortel data solutions are 50% more energy efficient. Green may be in, but Cisco products carry a huge energy tax.

Cisco’s response #1: market green and hope the customer doesn’t see the Cisco energy tax on his bill.
Cisco’s response #2: start redesigning its products (this probably won’t be just another upgrade).

What’s the customer to do #1: don’t get distracted by Cisco marketing
What’s the customer to do #2: fund your data and/or UC evolution through energy tax savings
What’s the customer to do #3: get the facts and do the math

Hyperconnectivity is a megatrend whereby everything and everyone that can benefit from being connected will be connected.

The down side is that things that don’t deliver business benefit can also be connected.

And today marks the thirtieth anniversary of spam- it first appeared on the ARPAnet on May 3 1978, as an over exuberant entrepreneur tried to promote his products by sending out an unsolicited bulk emailing.

The term ‘spam’ appeared some 15 years later (15 years ago) and has been highly disruptive to residential and business users alike.

According to Spamhaus, 90% of email today is spam with a mere 200 spammers accounting for 80% of this number!

Wouldn’t we all love to take away the privileges of hyperconnectivity from these 200? Unfortunately spam is one cost of openness that hyperconnectivity implies.

The implication for the industry is that there will be a continued requirement for intelligent network and application layer technologies within a layered defense architecture, to counter spam and its relatives (e.g. IM spams sometimes called SPIT).

Great news for enterprises, who now have a proven low risk choice to the guerilla.

Sure some of these have been loyal customers since the Bay days and are now moving to the latest and greatest.

But most are swapping out their incumbent vendor (often Cisco) in favor of better performance and resilience, lower energy consumption and/or lower TCO. Yet others are bringing a second vendor (Nortel) into their networking environment as part of a dual vendor strategy. In both these cases, interoperability with the installed base is table stake.

By way of example, the CIO of Fred Weber, a construction and materials supply company in Missouri, whose incumbent data vendor had not been Nortel, said “Quite frankly, we were dead set on another solution, but we listened to Nortel and we were very pleased with what they were able to provide.”

So get the facts and make the best choice for your business.