February 2009 Archives

In these economic times, application innovation that can positively impact customer service and revenues, or increase business effectiveness or decrease costs, are as important as ever.

One of the fundamental steps in achieving application innovation is to recognize that human delays slow business processes and that this costs enterprises real money. By decreasing or eliminating these human delays, enterprises can experience a significant and positive transformation by accelerating "time to X" -- time to decision, to revenue, to service, to support, to product; and by delivering increased business agility, accuracy, service velocity and business productivity.

The industry approach to this challenge is communications-enabled applications, which generally speaking allow
1) users to invoke UC functionality directly from within business application; and
2) business processes to directly initiate context-based UC communications triggered by some 'event'.

So customers often ask me "what are the sweet spots for communications-enabled applications in my enterprise?"

I would offer that the top characteristics of processes that can benefit most from UC enablement are as follows:
1) Processes that need the help of a subject matter expert
2) Processes with enough transactional volume and of long enough duration to be significant
3) Processes where there is a large elapsed idle delay due to lack of communication
4) Processes that have a direct touch with customers and partners
5) Areas with a lot of failed transactions

Once you have identified a business process that could be accelerated through communications enablement, only consider truly open software-centric solutions, such as the Nortel Agile Communication Environment (ACE). ACE has been designed from the start as vendor-agnostic communications integration software, that is a foundation for pre-packaged applications (such as hot-desking deployed by HSBC), and for customized communications-enabled applications, and as a toolkit for enterprise, SIs and ISV application developers.

How sweet it is!

Hyperconnectivity, as we all know, has a dark side in the form of new security threats. Now a computer virus (specifically the W32.Gammima.AG worm) has gone where no virus has ever gone before.... hitting laptops on the International Space Station.

This is a level 0 gaming virus intended to gather personal information. Is the message that the ISS is a technology game?

Al Warden, who spoke at the Nortel Technical Conference, has a unique perspective on this question. He was the command module pilot for the Apollo 15 moon mission in 1971, and expressed his own concern of the scientific value of the ISS program.

I diverge. The reality is that whether in your enterprise network or in orbit, hyperconnectivity is with us bringing its challenges (including security) and presenting tremendous opportunities for increased personal, team and business productivity.

I met yesterday with a number of customers of the regional branch of the Nortel user association (INNUA), and talked to them about our open UC solutions and the transformational nature of communications-enabled applications and business processes.

One attendee asked about the ability to invoke UC from within dashboards, since they were always open, and included corporate directory access and business related data.

I recalled a discussion I had with a CIO of a financial institution (a computer-centric world if there is one) who said "we run Sametime, but aren't interested in the Sametime client. We want UC to live in our email client"- a dashboard of a different sort.

Continuing along, I discussed the opportunity to deliver appropriate UC functionality to information workers (in many bank, tellers don't have access to email- it's a distraction), who live in a small number of key applications, and to service workers who don't have computers at all (or have a handheld device that is designed to do a few role-related functions- e.g., a barcode scanner running price check and inventory apps in a retail environment).

What do these three cases have in common (dashboards, UC in email clients, UC for info and service workers) have in common. While I am quite happy working with my UC client, they are all examples of users wanting to simply access UC where they live, and not have additional clients/complexity imposed on them.

How can this be achieved? Communications integration software available as a solution or as a toolkit with adaptors to multi-vendor voice/video and data infrastructures and with the ability to integrate into your application environment whether based on Microsoft, IBM or HP or whatever.

We call it the Nortel Agile Communication Environment (ACE) and in addition to communications-enabling your business processes, it allows you to deliver UC where your users live.

The industry has been talking about Software as a Service (SaaS) for almost a decade.

Now there's CaaS- Communications as a Service. CaaS is, I believe, going to be all the buzz for the next decade!

Why do I say this? CaaS is all about adding communication services, like conferencing, IM and video, into any online network service, whether for businesses or consumers. This includes social networking sites, online gaming, IPTV, as well as business-oriented SaaS offerings such as salesforce.com.

That's what Nortel's recently announced CaaS Transaction Broker is all about- initially targeting IBM's LotusLive, a new hosted social networking and collaboration service designed to help business customers maximize productivity.

How important is this for Nortel and its customers. According to Dell'Oro, Nortel is the worldwide leader in carrier VoIP and has maintained that position since 2002, having shipped over 100 million carrier IP voice and multimedia ports to over 320 carriers globally. So the opportunities are significant.

The number of wireless phones worldwide just crossed the 4 billion mark. Maybe 10% of these are currently connected to the Internet, but this is going to go way up, led by developments from Nortel and others.

How about another milestone?

There are now 1 million industrial robots, with the highest density in Japan with 295 robots for every 10K workers in manufacturing. Roughly, a third of these are in the automotive industry (they may be on paid leave!). The next nearest countries are Singapore, South Korea and Germany, each with between 163-169.

Two radically different forms of connectivity--- one hyperconnected world.

Key capabilities announced earlier this week include "the availability of new context, which will enable richer collaboration capabilities such as location and presence features." What does this mean in practical terms for OCS customers. Let me give you two examples.

We can now offer increased safety of lone workers through active tracking and application-initiated communications, by enhance Microsoft OCS by combining application-initiated communication sessions and GPS-based location information. Consent-based tracking to monitor safety of remote worker (for example social workers entering a potentially hostile environment) through periodic password based updates, failing which an alert is sent to supervisor or law enforcement agency

We also enable employee and partner communication with the right people in real-time by allowing UC initiation from any phone number or email address on any web page or web-enabled app. How do we do this? By embedding the complete OCS contact menu for any phone number or email address within web-enabled business application, whether it's ERP, HR and CRM. This allows click-to-communicate using email addresses, phone numbers or extensions from any Web page.

OCS gets richer with UC Applications and Services from Nortel, giving you bigger business value from your UC investments.

John McHugh now heads Nortel's Data Networking Division. A few years ago, he was selected as one of 50 most powerful people in networking as the head of HP's ProCurve group , winning kudos for his well-rounded enterprise strategy, which encompassed convergence, wireless LANs, WAN access and more.

John clearly has his sights on getting us ahead of the pack as the clear alternative to the gorilla in data.

After ITExpo, I took the opportunity, while I was in Miami, to meet with three customers, two Nortel voice shops and one "very happy" Nortel data shop.

Let me share with you some sound bytes from the two CIOs and an IT Director, with whom I spoke.

"I now better understand Nortel's filing is a solution to a problem".
"Nortel is well positioned in these economic times with their investment protection story".
Striking an alliance with Microsoft was "Nortel's best move", and should really help us.
"I am interested in web.alive for e-learning environments", web.alive being a proof point of our continued focus on innovation

I came away understanding that these customers will be sticking with Nortel. Thank you.

More broadly and since the announcements on January 14, the Nortel Enterprise Solutions business unit has had success in continuing to win new customers and securing contracts on a global basis. This goes beyond routine projects and includes the addition of hundreds of new wins across a variety of industries, including the world's largest hospitality network install; two world-renown universities; two of the world's largest financial services providers; an international airport; as well as leading medical centers and banking institutions.

Draw your own conclusions.

than one thing in common with Nortel..

Like Nortel, Global Crossing is a strong advocate of SIP and has developed a suite of SIP trunking services.

And like Nortel, they are working with Microsoft. Under the Innovative Communications Alliance, we are continuing to work to transform communications towards a software-centric environment, while Global Crossing is stepping up to meet the trunking needs of enterprises embracing OCS 2007.

These have come together in news that Global Crossing has demonstrated interoperability between OCS 2007 Release 2 and its SIP trunking offering. Sprint announced a similar offering.

This is an important step in evolving OCS into a telephony platform in the context of UC- most would agree that there is still much work to be done though OCS today can meet the needs of some types of users. Interestingly, Nortel can help enterprises embark on this road in a way that maintains the integrity of the end-to-end telephony system, while leveraging their existing investments (so critical in today's economic climate).

Earlier today, I presented in an ITExpo keynote session on UC. Surprisingly good attendance and some probing questions on mobility, converged networking , CEBP and the future of the desktop phone.

The theme of my talk was on Open UC.

I started by stating that Nortel was open for business, highlighting the fact that we are on track to deliver on the $300M, 10-year IPT contract with SSA. Support of our product portfolio to fulfill customer needs is also continuing- just visit Lenovo's elounge, the first highly deployment of web.alive, the product of Nortel's continuing innovation program.

I then talked to Open UC in 4 dimensions:
1. Open UC at the desktop, whether Exchange or Lotus Notes based, or based on Nortel's own MCS cleint or based on SCS 500 client, our open source UC solution for SMBs.
2. Open UC applications, whether for customer service, or for employee or group effectiveness or for business process acceleration.
3. Open UC into back-office environments for communications-enabled applications, whether based on Microsoft, IBM or JBOSS (e.g. Sun, HP) environments (as we have done with Orlando Regional Health).
4. Open UC over any voice, data or video infrastructure whether based on Nortel, Cisco, Tandberg or whatever (as in the HSBC solution)

I was very happy to see that IT Expo seems to have fought off the economic slump. Maybe that's a good omen.

O yes, it's been running for 10 years, so congrats to Rich, Greg and the gang. I think I spoke at the first one and many in between.