December 2008 Archives

Last month I introduced you to the most hyperconnected sport in the world.

On Sunday Nov 9, thirty solo racers left in an around the world solo, non-stop race (the Vendee Globe) in their 20m/60 foot 'formula 1' racing yachts. The fasted time todate? 87 days, 10 hours, 47 minutes and 55 seconds. During the first 24 hours, two boats were dismasted! Today, 18 boats remain and the leaders are just south of New Zealand (about half way).

Well, there's another race taking place for a 10,000 euro prize- a virtual one with over 250,000 participants! That's my boat, in the Southern Atlantic (I started late to try it out).

Based on where you want to go and 12/24/36-hour-wind forecasts, you choose your tack using one of seven sails. This race too will take months if you stick with it. Amazingly, the leader is also just south of New Zealand.

It's free, sorta- if you want an autopilot is will cost you 10 euros- sale optimization another 10 and timed-steering another 10. The advantage is that you don't get sea sick, you get to eat home cooking and there are no icebergs to dodge.... O yes, and you never get dismasted.

All in all, a nice distraction for the holidays.

All the best for 2009. Tony

A recent headline, as headlines should, caught my eye and those of some of our enterprise customers. But while the article itself is much clearer, the title is totally misleading- Nortel is not selling its enterprise Ethernet business.

Last September, Nortel did announce its intention to sell its Metro Ethernet Networks business, a unit that focuses on service provider markets and has some pretty impressive optical technology leadership.

The enterprise Ethernet business, a key product portfolio in our enterprise business, is likewise going strong. The only thing we are selling is superior UC-optimized networking solutions.
> We're a solid #2 in PoE stackables
> We have the first stackable to exceed a Tbit/s
> We have the facts behind our claims for 20x performance, 7x the reliability, 40% less energy consumption and up to 50% TCO reduction compared to the other guy.
> And we have customers coming our way.

So don't believe everything you read.

Last summer in Rotterdam, six teams competed in a Formula 0 race, a new zero emission race series took place on a .5Km track. Each car was powered by a commercial fuel cell that produces electricity from hydrogen.

How does this relate to green networking?

We are certainly not about to introduce an Ethernet Switch powered by a fuel cell. But green is certainly top of mind in Nortel, expressed as developing solutions that allows our customers to stop paying the Cisco Energy Tax ... and get some virtual cars off the road.

Did you know that every time you buy a CAT6500 instead of ERS8600....
• It is like adding 3.9 cars on the road per year !!!
• CO2 emissions = Electricity of 2.8 homes per year !!!
• CO2 emissions = Energy use of 1.9 homes per year !!!
• CO2 emissions = 2,415 Gallons of gasoline consumed

This is huge... and important.

University of Toledo (Ohio) is a case in point. The $1.5 million in estimated costs savings* on electrical consumption over 5 years provided a compelling case for making a switch from the University's incumbent networking vendor to Nortel. Their decision kept lots of virtual cars off the roads!

So you probably have some home to do and the Nortel Energy Efficiency Calculator could help.

"In the area of B2B virtual worlds ..., Nortel is the company to watch." So ends a report by Rich Tehrani. What excites Rich is a recent demo we gave him of Nortel's web.alive, a collaborative, browser-based virtual world application for enterprise use that provides an immersive, interactive and web integrated world with 3D voice and graphics.

I have covered web.alive (known as project chainsaw) in previous postings, but here I want to expand on where I see web.alive resonating with enterprises.

There are 3 areas, all of which fit with the participation culture of new millennials, whether customers or employees:

1) e-Commerce: Significant reduction in abandoned shopping carts resulting in increased sales, and higher customer satisfaction, all through a seamless migration from a company's portal into a 3D virtual store front.

2) e-Learning: Significant reduction in travel and environmental impacts through a very effective classroom and campus experience, recognizing that learning takes place as much from other students as it does from the instructor.

3) Collaboration: Improved quality and time improvement in group deliverables for planned and ad hoc interactions; ad hoc interactions particularly resonate with customers that have seen web.alive.

Stay tuned as we announce a number of trial customers in the New Year.

Quite a headline in these economic times.

In fact, WiPro received the Network World Asia IT All Stars Award 2008 for its innovative use of technology (specifically Nortel UC) to keep up with recruiting 20,000 new employees per year, this across its 55 industry-facing 'Centers of Excellence' spread across the globe.

WiPro may not be a household name to some. It's the world's largest independent R&D Services Provider with over 95000 employees serving 928 clients, including IBM, Microsoft and Hyundai.

What's the technology behind WiPro's business solution? Nortel Unified Communications based on its MCS 5100 and the Nortel IP Phone 1535, a high-resolution IP video phone (which, by the way, is unique as a desktop device having both wired and WiFi connectivity).

This innovative use of technology helps WiPro interview the right people on a face-to-face basis by simply dialing a phone number. Interview costs have dropped significantly, while the quality of the recruiting process has been maintained.

More broadly, the UC solution deployed by WiPro offers comprehensive UC functionality, delivers Nortel's level of reliability with security and performance, and integrates well with WiPro's existing systems & processes.

Congratulations to the WiPro team.

Today's Wall Street Journal article on Nortel raised some eyebrows and a formal response that "no bankruptcy filing is imminent" and a reminder that there are other, more positive, views in the industry.

My personal reaction was a little bit like that of Mark Twain who it is reported to have responded to a gratuitous obituary, "The report of my demise has been seriously exaggerated".

Just under a month ago, I wrote up a blog posting on another headline- "Nortel-Aggressive Measures to Weather The Storm"- that likewise greeted my morning coffee.

You may be interested in my thoughts then and still now, in which I concluded that "I think Nortel is better prepared than it was even a few weeks ago to come out stronger in the end".

I have got to agree with Forester on their perspective on IT in these economic times. They say "execs will clamour more and more for IT projects that reap real value". Absolutely- CIOs need to align their investments with the business needs... and develop metrics that illustrate progress towards this objective.

So let me look at two important investment areas.

The network. Sure it's critical for the business to have one that is not a bottleneck to running the business. But how is it beneficial to the business to spend twice as much as you need to by relying on one dominant vendor, or spending 65% more on power. Nortel data networks not only have a lower TCO and energy needs, but also deliver 20x the performance and 7x the reliability.

So the business objective you are delivering is freeing up critical resources to really move the business forward.

Having freed up resources (money and people), where should you invest?

Process Acceleration. There are of course many areas, but one that is receiving a lot of attention is UC- not just in improving personal productivity ( a poor business case in most cases) but in optimizing business processes. Accelerating approval processes, patient discharge times and problem resolution can reap real business value, while enhanced collaboration tools can immediately reduce travel costs.

So set aside talk of Recessions and take action to convert your IT investments into ROI.

It's been all over the news:.AT&T cutting its headcount by 12000.

But what does this have to do with hyperconnectivity?

Look below the covers. While its wired subscriber base is shrinking, AT&T is reaping the benefits of an 11.5% growth in worldwide smart phone sales (Gartner), in AT&T's case riding the iPhone wave.

Many of these smart phones are being used across the hyperconnected enterprise. And as we move to 4G wireless services and next gen 802.11n wireless LANs, it gets more interesting still. Not only will wireless increasingly become the preferred technology of all access (resulting in erosion of wired desktops), but wireless access capacity demands will drive higher capacity optical networks in the core.

Even in these economic times, networking technology will continue going down the path towards the 'unwired enterprise' enabled by wireless access and optical cores.

BTW, 'unwired enterprise', a term first coined by Nortel, has now been picked up by Sybase, which characterizes it as an environment in which information flows freely from the data center to the point of action, and back, anytime, anywhere. Nortel's vision goes beyond information to the people who are using it and to the communications enabled business processes.

You might have missed it, but Nortel is the worldwide leader in Carrier VoIP (cf. Dell'Oro Group), having shipped 100 million IP Powered Home and IP Powered Business. ports to 320 carriers, and to two thirds of IDC's worldwide listing of top 20 carriers.

Nortel is no slouch in enterprise VoIP either, and service providers are key partners in this regard.

For example, Verizon Business has just announced that it is adding a new IP PBX platform, the Nortel CS 1000 to its portfolio. The CS 1000 SIP trunking capability has been rigorously tested and certified with Verizon Business, providing agility and improved price performance over legacy ISDN approaches.

Extreme Networks has copied Nortel's campaign of attacking the Cisco Energy Tax, but then hides energy consumption behind unreal 'best practices', and creates a closed calculator tool.

Virtually all Extreme's estimated "savings" are based on their assumption that all phones/ports are powered off - every night, weekends and holidays. Basically Extreme's "Green IT" best practices design recommendation is that customers power their network down the equivalent of 106 days out of the year to save electricity. For the vast majority of companies that I talk to this approach does not make either business or operational sense. Reject this best practice and the result is higher energy bills and TCO with Extreme solutions.

Extreme's Energy Savings Estimator is hard coded and hides any of the assumptions used to arrive at the results. Contrast this with Nortel's approach of making all assumptions clearly visible to users of our tool and verifying these through third party testing with open invitations for competitor participation. One analyst I spoke to actually uses the Nortel Energy Efficiency Calculator in a two-day course he runs.

So don't get blind-sighted by Extreme claims ... and demand all the facts.