September 2008 Archives

Hyperconnectivity and particularly mobility is largely enabled or encumbered by battery power. Help is at hand from an unlikely source.

Something called Wireless Resonant Energy Link (WREL), a concept championed by MIT.

Intel Corp. recently demonstrated this technology at their Developer Forum. WREL can power various mobility devices without wires.

You still need batteries but you could leave your cables behind. Your handheld would get recharged when you are in a resonant energy hot spot. This could be as simple as putting your device on a table with an embedded transmit resonator.

It's all done through magnetic induction between an antenna (transmitter) operating at a specific frequency and a device tuned to that frequency. It's sort of similar to an opera singer hitting a note and shattering a glass. The demonstration actually lit a light bulb from a few feet away.

When might we see products? Some time after the next summer Olympics!

This just in from a friend, JohnT, who is a Technical Director at a UK SI.

"Last night I tried to attend the Cisco Collaboration Summit. Just to be clear, this was a Web conference run by one of the world's biggest conferencing vendor using their own in-house Webex conferencing service to announce enhancements to their UC and conference offerings. We had to pre-register so you would think that they could plan for it to go smoothly. Well, when I first tried to join I got a message saying "Close your browser" (what, all of my sessions?) "and restart in 1 min 23 secs" (...and counting). So I did and got server error messages several times which indicated that the servers were overloaded (or under-spec'd as we server guys say). After 30 minutes of retrying I finally got a screen saying 'webex.' and 'waiting for video.webexlivestream.com' but no video."

His closing message to me was "Don't bet your conferencing solution on these people".

My read is that Cisco's plan to use this 'platform to integrate UC into business applications', puts enterprises at risk and doesn't meet their primary needs.

CXO's tell us that, while there is a place for SaaS (and it better be reliable), communications-enabled applications must be deliverable on secure and reliable platforms they can deploy in their own data centers.

The Nortel SOA-based Agile Communication Environment enables communications enablement of business processes, is vendor agnostic and spans both enterprise and hosted environments.

UC without effective presence and IM is like telephony without dial-tone.

So here we have Cisco spending your contributions (remember the Cisco Energy Tax) to acquire Jabber to give them IM for their un-unified UC story. Does this result in a 41st server to deliver UC?

UC has to unify both the end user experience AND the underlying infrastructure, and I don't see Jabber moving Cisco towards the latter objective.

The EnergySmart Hospitals Initiative was launched last July and aims to help improve efficiency in existing buildings by 20%! This is a laudable objective, since more than 50% of institutions reported double digit energy cost increases... and lights out operation is not an option.

Part of that saving can be achieved by switching to Nortel healthcare solutions, which use 40% less energy, while delivering 7x the resilience of those from Cisco.

This is a win-win for energy conscious hospitals who also demand clinical-grade networks.

In a recent blog, John Roese, Nortel CTO, highlighted the IT infrastructure behind CERN's Large Haldron Collider, 'the single largest machine ever built and the biggest scientific experiment ever conducted on the planet'. This 'grid' will distribute, process and analyze some 15 petabytes each year.

What John failed to mention is that the primary network behind CERN is not based on core routers, as is done in the Internet at large and in conventional research and education networks. Networking researchers concluded that core routers just couldn't meet the latency demands for the huge files that needed to be shipped around and for the grid computing applications (i.e. packet segmentation was one major culprit).

Instead, the network is based on lightpaths, 10Gbps lambdas and SONET/SDH pipes, between computing facilities.

The network currently spans Europe and North America, and extends to Taipei and Mumbai.

The plan is to allow these lightpaths to be established dynamically by the applications themselves (a case of communications enabled applications).

Nortel has collaborated for many years with leading networking research institutions such as Northwestern University in Chicago (StarLight in the US, SURFnet in the Netherlands (including Netherlight), and CANARIE in Canada.

This type of out-of-box thinking is also behind Nortel's leadership in 40 and 100 Gbps optical systems and optical Ethernet networking, including technologies such as Provider Backbone Transport (PBT).

The challenges of Hyperconnectivity are clear: lower personal productivity and unsatisfied employees .... ineffective distributed teams and missed milestones and/or poorer quality of deliverables ..... on-hold business processes, slowed down by not being able to reach decision makers in a timely fashion ..... connectivity mayhem with a plethora of network attached devices .... exploding IT complexity and TCO.

So what should you do?

Well a couple of months ago, I set out to answer the question. I spoke to customers, listened to what analysts had to say, explored how Nortel IT was approaching the challenge and defined five high level calls to action.

I then captured the information in a white paper, aptly called "The Hyperconnected Enterprise- a CIO's Survival Guide".

Is the term 'survival' too strong. Frankly, it wasn't my first choice, preferring terms such as 'strategic imperatives'. But I went along with this suggestion, since the job expectancy of CIOs these days is based less on operational metrics (though still table stake) and more on delivering enhanced business value to the business, whether the business is a bank, a not-for-profit hospital or government agency.

There's more. Check out some video podcasts (I personally liked the animation-enhanced YouTube video) and an article by Joel Hackney, the President of Nortel Enterprise.

The 2008 Paralympics are going strong in Beijing. And you can watch the highlights on the ParalympicsSport TV network on YouTube.

Watching these athletes is inspirational to say the least, but it can be tiring on the body, since your PC may not be where your couch is.

How about this ergonomically designed chair from which to watch wheel chair basketball? You could even shoot some stationary baskets!

Good to see the Paralympics is accessible to the Hyperconnected!

"Business executives are extremely concerned (and rightly so) that their organization may be the next publicly disclosed data breach story in the Wall Street Journal." That's how I led off a recent article, co-authored with Jon Oltsik of the Enterprise Strategy Group, on network access control (aka secure network access).

Secure network access authenticates users wanting to access the network, performs endpoint health checks, and authorizes network and application access based on role-based policies.

Network access control tied to one vendor's switching platform has been used as part of a lock-in strategy by network vendors. In a hyperconnected world, the last thing you want is a 'closed' access control strategy.

We, at Nortel, are taking a very different 'open' approach, which has been recognized with a Gold Award from SecureNetworking.com.

Our approach, just released as Nortel SNA 2.0,
• provides a common architecture across environments (LAN, WLAN, VPN),
• supports Nortel and non-Nortel switches (including those from Cisco and HP),
• works across desktop platforms including Windows, Linux and MacOS, IP phones and printers,
• seamlessly integrates with Microsoft Network Access Protection on both the client and server sides, and
• adheres to the Trusted Computing Group's Trusted Connect specifications.

So enhance your security while opening up to multi-vendor solutions.

Almost forgot! Did I mention that independent testing has also found the energy consumption of the Nortel SNA 4050 is 63% less than that of the Cisco solution (Clean Access 3310 Manager and Server)? Why am I not surprised? The Cisco energy tax is pervasive.

If UC is in your future, you may be interested in this book and associated certification program.

It is targeted at IT professionals and decision makers in organizations considering UC deployments. It focuses on how UC deployments must be designed from a business process perspective, rather than as driven from a technology perspective.

The information provided is generic and applies to whatever supplier you have or are considering

You can review the first three chapters on-line, including a Forward by Nora Freedman of IDC.

If you go down the UC certification path, you will tangibly show increased value as an IT professional.

You may have seen our recent ads on, for example, CNN.

Nicknamed the 'Nortel Piles' and 'Nortel Holes' commercials, these ads talk to the piles of money enterprises are wasting on the Cisco Energy Tax, and on the leakage of IT budget through the holes created by the Cisco Energy Tax.

They are clever and get the message across: You can save 40% on your energy bill by moving from Cisco to Nortel.

The commercials are not just clever marketing, but reflect the facts as verified by the Tolly Group.

In fact, enterprises around the world have collectively spent an estimated $6.1 billion more on energy expenses in the last five years than they needed to. And the environmental impacts are huge.

So how much are you paying? You can now work it out yourself.

A recent Wainhouse survey suggests that UC has shifted from being a strategic imperative to becoming a tactical challenge.

Two ways of reading this.

One is that when viewed solely from the perspective of raising personal productivity, then, UC is no more strategic than unified messaging was.

The other is that CXOs have business problems to solve and technology alone is seldom the answer. A key challenge for CXOs is how to improve and/or innovate new business processes, which implicitly drives a closer alignment between IT investments and business objectives.

The notion that UC is communications integrated to optimize business processes, elevates UC to being a strategic opportunity: improving customer service, accelerating business process, enhancing collaboration across the virtual enterprises, even contributing to Green initiatives through travel reduction.

The survey said that although only 15% of companies have done a UC needs assessment, almost 50% are well on the path to selecting their vendor. Not the right balance.

UC decisions should be made with an eye to establishing a supplier partnership and UC foundation for communications enabling their business processes. Specifically, going with a vendor that promotes a network-centric vertically integrated approach may actually be a bottleneck for application innovation. Going with an open SOA environment does just the opposite and creates opportunities for application innovation

The mantra might be: think strategically and deploy tactically.