Results of a survey of more than 700 corporate managers and CIO and VP-of-IT-level executives provided some insights into the challenges these are facing. Asked "What do you see as the main opportunities before CIOs today?", the No. 1 answer is "improve and/or innovate new business processes."

That's why many are looking at unified communications as more than a personal productivity tool, but as a tool to streamline business processes.

How? you might ask. By leveraging SOA to communications enable business processes, which are slowed down by human latency. This delivers the agility for application innovation and business process acceleration.

Cisco just announced a four-year plan to make its business more environmentally friendly, but nothing specific to make its products more energy efficient. The Cisco energy tax will continue.

But Cisco IT doesn't have the option of saving a bundle by using Nortel data solutions. With over 65K employees and HQ'd in California, this is no small change: $10M and 40M KWH over 5 years.

Fortunately, unlike Cisco IT, you have a choice.

As did the Spring Independent School District in Houston, Texas, which is buying Nortel networking solutions, after assessing the Nortel's energy efficiency offer.

Watt should you do? Start by getting the facts.

You might have seen the news that Nortel was shifting more 4G wireless R&D into something called LTE- Long Term Evolution.

Up until recently, enterprises saw Nortel as championing WiMax as a "true broadband" solution for enterprise, with key technologies such as MIMO and OFDM coming from Nortel. WiMax really resonated with these customers:
- It has the right name which spells Internet economics
- It has the right name which spells IP-optimized application performance;
- It operates in both licensed and unlicensed bands;
- It was being integrated into handhelds, thanks to the likes of Intel;
- It was going to be offered soon by wireless service providers like Sprint and possibly by cablecos and new operators; and
- It brings more competition to the wireless marketplace.
Nortel is still championing WiMax as a here-and-now opportunity and has partnered with Alvarion to strengthen its position.

So what about LTE?
- It has a dismal name (a name that would embarrass any marketer)
- It is another 4G technologies that will deliver IP-optimized application performance, and can be even faster than WiMax;
- It is based on MIMO and OFDM technologies that were largely invented by Nortel;
- It operates only in the licensed band;
- It will also be integrated into handhelds; and
- It is in the plans of most major incumbent wireless service provider.

Basically, while WiMax is starting to be offered today by some service providers today, expect to see LTE as an offering from an incumbent wireless service provider near you (towards the end of the decade after the standards are finalized).

Both WiMax and LTE are 4G technologies that will deliver the "true broadband" mobile experience to enterprise users (and consumers).

Together with 802.11n, the 100+Mbps WiFi draft standard, these 4G wireless solutions will deliver on Nortel's Unwired Enterprise vision.

One of the key topics at this year's Nortel Technology Conference is increased innovation acceleration.

P&G was given as an example of a company that is pioneering new approaches to innovation and R&D. Back in 2000 and faced with top line growth shortfalls, they made a strategic decision to shift how they innovate to more of a 'Connect and Develop C&D' approach. They went from a "not invented here- NIH" mentality ("from the labs") to a "proudly found elsewhere" mentality ("through the labs").

This has been highly successful for P&G, who
> went from nearly 15% to 35% of R&D being done by connecting to external resources;
> doubled their innovation success rate with 100 new products, and
> increased R&D productivity by 60%.

Product and service innovation is the engine of growth in many enterprises.

Whether you follow the traditional organic R&D approach or the innovative C&D approach used by P&G or anything in between, what is clear is that rich collaborative capabilities including UC and virtual environments in the future are required to fully leverage creative ideas wherever they are.

I am here in Orlando at the Nortel Technical Conference, hosted by John Roese, our CTO, and attended by 350 of Nortel's brightest technologists.

The theme of the conference is 'Revolutionizing the User Experience', and I'm not just talking about the UC client.

When a customer enters your store or branch, you probably have a 1 in 3 chance of closing the deal, but not so on the web, where you're down to 1 in a 100. What if you could establish a web presence that could dramatically improve this ratio, for example by extending your presence to the consumer's preferred social networking environment, or having the customer enter a 3D world where they can explore your offers and interact with other customers and your service agents?

Take another example. I have spoken of accelerating the business by eliminating human latency. This will be done by providing employees with the ability to initiate communications directly from within an application they are using, or having business processes reach out to employees and groups who are in the best position to expedite the decision. In both cases, the user experience can be significantly enhanced through context, which can include their role and what they need to know, what they are doing, and where they are.

As communications and IT converge in a software-centric world, communications enabled business processes and applications will significantly change the customer experience and increase enterprise productivity.

Nortel technologists are exploring these opportunities today.

You have probably read about Nortel's Software Communications System 500 (SCS500), a Unified Communications (UC) SIP-centric software solution for SMB (30-500 users), and that our go to market includes IBM and Dell.

What you may not know is that the SCS500 is based on open source from SIPfoundry, and blends the best of both the open source framework and Nortel's experience and expertise in voice, data, multimedia and unified communications. Why did we choose sipXecs from SIPfoundry as the basis for SCS500?

Four primary reasons:
1. Our strategy is UC, and sipXecs is a native SIP solution consistent with our strategy. Asterisk on the other hand is focused on being a PBX replacement and is architected to switch audio streams with all media going through a centralized system.

2. Our strategy is user and application scalability which is what sipXecs delivers inside and out (technically sipXecs is architected around a SIP Proxy). Asterisk is architected as an end system (the technical term is a Back-to-back User Agent), providing transcoding to different legacy protocols (like H323) across a proprietary centralized core. Bottom-line: sipXecs is a distributed system that can scale in number of users and accommodate all the additional services necessary to deliver UC.

3. Our strategy is centered on delivering high Quality of Experience via peer communications, allowing voice or video streams to go directly between end points (keeping delays and bandwidth to a minimum). Contrast the sipXecs architecture with Asterisk's, the latter being modeled after a traditional PBX with all signaling and media bundled on the same path always.

4. Our strategy is centered on delivering Simplifications. sipXecs comes with sipXconfig, a complete and very comprehensive management system. Asterisk has nothing in this area.

SCS500 is the culmination of more than 250 groundbreaking contributions from Nortel into SIPfoundry (which has 2x the code base of the older Asterisk) , solidifying our leadership in the global open source ecosystem. Nortel also has an extensive developer community, with more than 60 developer partners and close to 400 active members.

SMBs probably don't care about open source as they do about accelerating their businesses through UC (like the big guys), having a system that grows with the business in size and scope; delivers consistent user experience and is easy to manage.

Sorry for the word choice, but Cisco Motion vision marketing can make you dizzy;)

The marketing folks at Cisco have been busy creating a mobility vision, in response to real enterprise challenges of Hyperconnectivity. The formula is all too familiar. Identify all the right user challenges... Spin a vision story around a not-so-exciting product announcement.... Usually add a five phase picture (magically you're already at phase 3!) and .... Create industry buzz around the works.

But Cisco's recent Motion vision announcement (and related 'phase 0' product announcement of a glorified location-based WiFi controller) raises more questions than it answers.

For example:
Why would enterprises want to invest in a network-centric approach at the expense of application agility?
What if you want to deploy best-of-breed wireless intrusion prevention from another vendor?
Will you be constrained in your RFID or UWB vendor selection under Motion?
How does a WiFi-centric appliance 'unify disparate networks' and 'facilitate collaboration'?

But the biggest question in my mind is that Motion is an architectural no-man's land (or is it sea?).

Cisco says that their vision 'abstracts the application layer from the network layer'. This sounds like SOA but it's not! SOA is software centric and network agnostic. Application developers don't want to know about appliances.

Cisco has introduced a network embedded appliance that is specific to the in-building wireless- actually to the WiFi- network. This sounds like SONA, but it's not- maybe Cisco is giving up on SONA, which has had minimal traction anyway!).

Application developers tell us they want a SOA-enabled framework into which to work, that is totally independent of the underlying infrastructure, whether wired or wireless, enterprise or carrier. For example, does it make any sense to bring public network location-based information into the enterprise via a WiFi appliance? Among other things, this seems to create a bottleneck for application innovation and scalability.

There are already solutions that offer context/location aware services, roaming and FMC, end point security and wireless IPS. A key differentiator in our approach to Communications Enabled Applications, is the Nortel Agile Communication Environment (ACE).

Nortel ACE truly abstracts the application layer from the network layer; supports aggregated presence, and in-building and wide area context (location, policy, identity) services; has adaptors to various network infrastructures (including Nortel and Cisco Call Manager), and is built on SOA (in fact, integrating IBM's Websphere today and other frameworks in the near future).

Are you starting to feel a little queasy about Cisco's Motion vision marketing?

Nortel is now talking about over 800 wins with Microsoft, with our suite of unified communications solutions and professional services. There are actually ten different solutions being delivered today, including our Converged Office, which integrates the Nortel IP PBX with LCS/OCS.

One of these customers is the Integrys Energy Group, headquartered in Chicago. I had an interesting lunch with Craig M. of Integrys at our User Conference in Dallas earlier this week. Craig explained to me, how seconds saved in the energy trading environment, can translate into significant returns.

Integrys deployed a Unified Communications solutions that included federated instant messaging, to allow energy traders to make energy purchases via a secure bidding process in the public instant messaging arena. This, along with 1500 UC seats of Converged Office, earned them a Technology Innovation Best Practice award.

This brings out a fourth Unified C of Unified Business: Unified Community (joining Unified Communications-enabled apps, Unified Clients and Unified Collaboration.

"Another factor (in our decision to go with Nortel data) included costs savings on electrical consumption alone. This, combined with ease of configuration, time tested resiliency capabilities, and absence of code security issues commonly found in other vendor products provided a compelling case for making a switch from the University's incumbent vendor." That comes from Michael Firsdon, Network Engineering team lead at the University of Toledo (Ohio).

In fact the savings are no small change: $1.5M over 5 years, a number referenced by Joel Hackney at his keynote at Nortel user conference.

Customers are getting the facts on Nortel vs Cisco solutions, a key tool being the Nortel Energy Efficiency Calculator.

While Cisco may tell you that the Cisco Energy Tax is temporary (governments say this all the time to get a vote), don’t expect it to go away anytime soon.

I wrote about the Cisco Energy Tax being architecturally rooted and requiring significant product redesign.

But get the total scoop from JT Turgeon of our Ethernet Switching group, and draw your own conclusions.

Tom Hughes, CIO of SSA, had a keynote at the Nortel User Conference, on his perspectives on VoIP and UC. SSA recently signed the largest single VoIP contract valued at $300M, across 64000 employees, 1600 field offices, and a massive contact center; all over 10 years. Tom sees this as putting SSA on the road to UC, a transformational opportunity.

When asked what his big challenges are, he responded: security and helping execs understand the business benefits of UC.

He lamented a common situation that "Lots of execs don't quite get it". He held an informal poll of the audience and observed that only a third indicated that IT was at the business strategy table.

Getting attention of the C suite requires IT to show quantifiable top and bottom-line benefits. That was also the view expressed by Bob Hafner of Gartner, who was on a panel after the keynote. In the case of SSA, they are targeting hundreds of millions of dollars in savings.

My sense from listening to Tom speak, is that 'he's the man' with the right blend of technology and business savvy to move SSA forward.

This is good news for Americans on their own road to retirement (someday!).

Every year, Nortel’s User Group recognizes enterprises that demonstrate the most resourceful uses of developing technologies or service deployment strategies. For Sustained Excellence award went to Orlando Regional Health (yesterday’s blog tells you why).

This year the award for Enterprise Transformation for a company with over 1000 employees went to Barclays Bank, who are driving £200M in savings and efficiencies through their Contact Centre Transformation Program

Barclays has worked with Nortel to link 45 worldwide contact center locations. Substantial integration to Barclays own desktop screen pop applications and back end banking systems and workflow systems was also achieved. For example, agents are prompted with the "next best offer" to make to the client.

Barclays and Orlando Regional Health are both testimonials to the benefits of successful execution of Unified Business strategies.

I’m at the Nortel User Conference, a large international event in Dallas that stretches over 5 days.

The opening keynote was by Joel Hackney, the President of Nortel’s Enterprise division. He commented that it’s not really about Unified Communications, but about “Unified Business”. In his mind, that’s where the value prop lies.

Later in the day, the notion of Unified Business was really brought home when I spent time with Dr Marc Demers, a surgical oncologist at Orlando Regional Health.

He told me how the patient discharge application developed by Nortel, has advanced patient discharge by an average of 4 hours. He commented that a new bed costs in the order of $1M, so that using beds more efficiently means big savings, and of course better patient service.

Dr Demers stressed that, for him, it’s all about simplification.

This got me thinking about the three Unified Cs of Unified Business:
1. Unified Communications-enabled Applications to accelerate the business process from order entry to discharge.
2. Unified Clients to make life simple for clinicians.
3. Unified Collaboration to enable synchronization of activities to make the discharge happen and get the bed ready for the next patient.

What a great story of alignment between IT and the business.