August 2008 Archives

With its recent acquisition of PostPath, a maker of e-mail and calendaring software, the word on the street is that Cisco is positioning to strike at Microsoft's Exchange crown jewels.

This is not inconsequential for "Microsoft shops' looking for UC solutions.

Cisco has been telling enterprises to buy their UC now, and that interoperability with Exchange/OCS environments will come later.

The relationship between Cisco and Microsoft is already pretty precarious on the UC front with competing UC solutions. Given that Exchange is very tightly linked to Microsoft's UC strategy, the likelihood of any meaningful interoperability is increasingly doubtful.

Contrast that with the alliance between Nortel and Microsoft. The Nortel Converged Office for the Communications Server 1000 is the first and only fully qualified IP PBX for integration with Microsoft OCS 2007.

This has got to be one of the slickest and simplest security solutions for remote users, that I have seen.

Just plug in your Nortel Secure Portable Office USB key into your Windows PC, and
...... your user identity is authenticated using Aladdin Knowledge Systems eToken strong authentication and password management,
...... a secure VPN connection is established,
...... your PC is virus scanned, and
...... you are presented with a menu of authorized network applications you can access.

No pre-installed software, no URLs to remember, and your corporate policy moves from paper to the field while incurring a very low TCO.

Check it out yourself and let Nortel Global Services do the rest.

First, the Vancouver 2010 Olympics, then the London 2012 Olympics chose Nortel technology.

One ... and then two golds.

Then General Motors Place in Vancouver, the home of the Vancouver Canucks hockey team, decided to go with Nortel to deliver a UC experience to their fans.

That's a hat trick.

Now the New York Mets baseball club is loading up the bases in their new 42000-seat Citi Field stadium with Nortel technology , making it a technology showpiece.

That's a grand slam for Nortel and our customers.

If you're like me, the people with whom you work are all over the place. So how do you get the job done? You have some traditional tools: phone calls, email, audio and video conferencing, web presentation tools. You have new tools such as Unified Communications and telepresence if you're lucky enough and the people are in the right place.

Do these cover all aspects of how work is done? I would suggest no.

Think about the last time you had an on-site team meeting with your virtual team. Surely you had a kick off by the team leader, maybe some workshops (typically split between presentation and dialog modes) and lots of side discussions (in the back of the room, in the hallway, over coffee).

Where did the value come from? Some from the kickoff and workshop presentations... lots from the workshop dialogs, coffee breaks and side discussions. And what about the value of bumping into someone with the critical knowledge you need?

Does UC address these capabilities? Only partially. For group discussions, UC unifies audio or video conferencing, but these turn to noise during coffee breaks! Side discussions can be done in a limited way via IMs- a poor substitute for having a rich verbal interaction with a peer.

So what's the answer?

Enterprise-grade virtual reality solutions that incorporate avatars tagged with employee directory information (name, photo, role), integrated with UC and other business-oriented collaboration tools, and with business processes. This environment supports presentation, group discussions and ad hoc side meeting, the latter two enhanced by 3D audio, which allows two or more people in close virtual proximity to have private side discussions... just like real life.

Is virtual reality a reality for business? It soon will be from Nortel. We just announced our development of web.alive (part of our CTO Innovation Program), and our acquisition of 3D audio expertise and technology from DiamondWare. Web.alive is a software application accessible from a standard browser. You invoke its capabilities when it makes sense to better get the job done.

I've used web.alive and it delivers on our vision for unified communications and beyond. Very neat, simple and effective.

The AC Milan football/soccer team has won 18 officially recognized international titles, more than any other club in the world.

To enhance its performance, MilanLab was established in 2002 as the team's High Tech Scientific Research Centre, the primary purpose of which is to optimize the psycho-physical management of the athletes.

To this end, they have partnered with Microsoft to develop a UC-enabled athlete monitoring system to track the total state of physical, mental and social well-being of each athlete, balancing three principal functional levels: neurostructural, physio-chemical-biological, and mental. The ultimate objective is to manage optimized training programs around these dependencies, void injuries and speed up recovery when injuries occur.

Interestingly, league rules prohibit sensors on players during games, but there are no such restrictions in practices.

UC comes to play to enable richer communications among personal trainers, management and the athletes. Needless to say, the system will stress UC usability beyond the office environment having to cater to the whims of some thirty multimillionaire athletes;)

Not surprisingly, not much information is available on the status of the system, given it's highly competitive nature.

Last week, I met with an investment bank, who was very impressed with our UC application solutions for its Sametime environment. The focus of our discussion was around Nortel's Agile Communication Environment (ACE), our solution for both Sametime integration and communications enabled applications.

During the lively discussion with the institution's networking, desktop and application folks, it became clear that UC presence alone was of limited business value compared to context-enhanced UC.

For example, the stock price drops- knowing a financial analyst is on the phone may be of little value, but knowing that the analyst is speaking to a client who has shares in the stock has great value.

ACE, SOA-enabled communications integration middleware, can be used to deliver this additional context to the business process.

The bank was also interested in ACE as a toolkit, which would allow its application developers to leverage its capabilities with its home grown applications.

The institution is in a highly competitive market. Time is literally money. Nortel ACE brings context, not just presence, to the bank, which means shorter time to decision.

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.

Now we have bought PingTel, an open source pioneer. Where does Pingtel fit it? Pingtel is to SIPfoundry what Red Hat Enterprise Linux is to Fedora.

This acquisition demonstrates our commitment to openness and to communications as an application.
1. Our strategy is UC, and sipXecs is a native SIP solution consistent with our strategy.
2. Our strategy is user and application scalability..
3. Our strategy is centered on delivering high Quality of Experience.
4. Our strategy is centered on delivering Simplifications.

By the way, these strategies dictated why sipXecs was chosen over Asterisk, a clearly inferior open source environment.

With Olympic fever run strong, couch-bound watchers may want to think about how to combine work with fitness. Of course, work can be replaced with watching the amazing Michael Phelps bring in the Gold (again). Walk faster;)

Ran across a health-oriented workstation developed with help from the Mayo Clinic.

The next step could be a green solution- when you stop pedaling or walking, your PC shut downs and your day is done!

I've written extensively about the Cisco energy tax.

We have run into tow type of situations.
1. Enterprises with Green initiatives and someone who is accountable, immediately embrace 40% lower energy efficiency with Nortel (over Cisco) and start asking all the right questions (e.g. "Are we really best served by putting all our networking investments in Cisco's coffers?")
2. Others understand the Cisco energy tax but come back that they don't see or own the monthly energy bill, and so they don't have the budgetary impetus to change what they are doing.

Last week, we neatly addressed the latter type of customer with a win-win offer. Specifically, if you are a first time Nortel data buyer in North America, you could get an energy saving credit towards equipment purchases, based on your first year energy savings.

How is this credit calculated? Based on the Nortel Energy Efficiency Calculator, of course. And you can see what your credit would be by running through the calculator yourself.

In this way, you can double the energy saving benefits of Nortel data solutions - first in the upfront credit which improves your IT budget line, and then through reduced energy consumption improving your enterprise's bottom-line.

The stats are awesome:
- $400M IT budget
- Keeping track of 200000 accreditations, that includes, as well as athletes, judges and coaches, 21 600 journalists
- Moving, processing and storing data for 10,500 athletes, participating in 302 events in 28 sports at 39 competitive venues over 7 cities
- 1 million pages served per day across 1100 servers

And the world watches:
- 4 million spectators at the event
- An estimated 4 billion television viewers
- An expected 11 billion web hits

And we, at Nortel, know what technology it takes to stage such a world class event, since we are helping deliver flawless communications experiences at both the Vancouver 2010 Winter Games and the London 2012 Summer Games.

You may want to read the technical paper I wrote on a behind the scenes view of the first all IP Network that we are building for Vancouver.

Last December, I blogged on the fact that I had unplugged my desktop phone (replacing it with a LG-Nortel USB phone 8501), though I observed that this wasn't for everyone!

Well I attended the Nortel Technical Conference, and in fact hosted the final day, and won a new desktop phone- sort of.

Actually, the handset is a Bluetooth device married to my cell phone. Look carefully- no flexicord of olde.

What could have been my grandfather's rotary dial phone is my improvisation for a handset cradle- some place to put my new handset. Fits perfectly!

Visitors get a puzzled look when I answer a call (with my cell on vibrate) using this handset.

No geekier, IMHO, than people who wear cyber ear buds and walk down the street talking into the air;)

Some of the largest and medium-sized U.S. airports report close to 637,000 laptops lost each year. Wow, this figure has got to make you think.

Combine this with the IDC prediction that the number of worldwide mobile workers (many with laptops and many more with smart phones) will reach 1 billion - including nearly 75% of the U.S. workforce - by the end of 2011... and you should have serious concerns.

Clearly, protecting data on laptops, PDAs and smart phones is of tantamount importance to businesses.

Hyperconnectivity comes with its security risks.

The answer lies in corporate policies, device data encryption and network-based data-based storage, and in combinations of these.

By the way, check out this VoIP security blog, primed by the security group in the Nortel CTO.

Enterprises need to think three times before looking at post acquisition Gores Siemens Enterprise Networking (SEN).

1. SEN didn't have a data play and used to partner with a number of data vendors. Now they have had a tier 3 data player thrust on them, previously Enterasys, previously Cabletron. If you are looking for a data solution, Nortel Business Optimized Networking is a lower risk approach delivering 7x the reliability, 20x the performance, requiring 40% less energy and delivering up to 50% lower TCO compared to Cisco.

2. Are you a Microsoft shop? SEN used to be very closely aligned with Microsoft but that relationship has gone belly up. So how will Gores-SEN meet your UC needs? Don't go there. Better consider the Nortel-Microsoft Innovative Communications Alliance with 800 wins to date.

3. Are you an IBM shop? SEN OEM'd voice technology to IBM, so no reason to consider Gores-SEN as well? I would say forget it. The Nortel BM Alliance includes joint marketing and selling, UC software solutions for SMBs (SCS500), joint UC solutions, SOA for Communications Enabled Applications, and joint professional services.

Finally, you should additionally be concerned on how Gores is going to satisfy its investment targets. Are cost cutting and staff reductions planned?