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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.