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. Why did we choose sipXecs from SIPfoundry as the basis for SCS500?

Four primary reasons:
1. Our strategy is UC, and sipXecs is a native SIP solution consistent with our strategy. Asterisk on the other hand is focused on being a PBX replacement and is architected to switch audio streams with all media going through a centralized system.

2. Our strategy is user and application scalability which is what sipXecs delivers inside and out (technically sipXecs is architected around a SIP Proxy). Asterisk is architected as an end system (the technical term is a Back-to-back User Agent), providing transcoding to different legacy protocols (like H323) across a proprietary centralized core. Bottom-line: sipXecs is a distributed system that can scale in number of users and accommodate all the additional services necessary to deliver UC.

3. Our strategy is centered on delivering high Quality of Experience via peer communications, allowing voice or video streams to go directly between end points (keeping delays and bandwidth to a minimum). Contrast the sipXecs architecture with Asterisk's, the latter being modeled after a traditional PBX with all signaling and media bundled on the same path always.

4. Our strategy is centered on delivering Simplifications. sipXecs comes with sipXconfig, a complete and very comprehensive management system. Asterisk has nothing in this area.

SCS500 is the culmination of more than 250 groundbreaking contributions from Nortel into SIPfoundry (which has 2x the code base of the older Asterisk) , solidifying our leadership in the global open source ecosystem. Nortel also has an extensive developer community, with more than 60 developer partners and close to 400 active members.

SMBs probably don't care about open source as they do about accelerating their businesses through UC (like the big guys), having a system that grows with the business in size and scope; delivers consistent user experience and is easy to manage.

The marketing folks at Cisco have been busy creating a mobility vision, in response to real enterprise challenges of Hyperconnectivity. The formula is all too familiar. Identify all the right user challenges... Spin a vision story around a not-so-exciting product announcement.... Usually add a five phase picture (magically you're already at phase 3!) and .... Create industry buzz around the works.

But Cisco's recent Motion vision announcement (and related 'phase 0' product announcement of a glorified location-based WiFi controller) raises more questions than it answers.

For example:
Why would enterprises want to invest in a network-centric approach at the expense of application agility?
What if you want to deploy best-of-breed wireless intrusion prevention from another vendor?
Will you be constrained in your RFID or UWB vendor selection under Motion?
How does a WiFi-centric appliance 'unify disparate networks' and 'facilitate collaboration'?

But the biggest question in my mind is that Motion is an architectural no-man's land (or is it sea?).

Cisco says that their vision 'abstracts the application layer from the network layer'. This sounds like SOA but it's not! SOA is software centric and network agnostic. Application developers don't want to know about appliances.

Cisco has introduced a network embedded appliance that is specific to the in-building wireless- actually to the WiFi- network. This sounds like SONA, but it's not- maybe Cisco is giving up on SONA, which has had minimal traction anyway!).

Application developers tell us they want a SOA-enabled framework into which to work, that is totally independent of the underlying infrastructure, whether wired or wireless, enterprise or carrier. For example, does it make any sense to bring public network location-based information into the enterprise via a WiFi appliance? Among other things, this seems to create a bottleneck for application innovation and scalability.

There are already solutions that offer context/location aware services, roaming and FMC, end point security and wireless IPS. A key differentiator in our approach to Communications Enabled Applications, is the Nortel Agile Communication Environment (ACE).

Nortel ACE truly abstracts the application layer from the network layer; supports aggregated presence, and in-building and wide area context (location, policy, identity) services; has adaptors to various network infrastructures (including Nortel and Cisco Call Manager), and is built on SOA (in fact, integrating IBM's Websphere today and other frameworks in the near future).

Are you starting to feel a little queasy about Cisco's Motion vision marketing?

One of these customers is the Integrys Energy Group, headquartered in Chicago. I had an interesting lunch with Craig M. of Integrys at our User Conference in Dallas earlier this week. Craig explained to me, how seconds saved in the energy trading environment, can translate into significant returns.

Integrys deployed a Unified Communications solutions that included federated instant messaging, to allow energy traders to make energy purchases via a secure bidding process in the public instant messaging arena. This, along with 1500 UC seats of Converged Office, earned them a Technology Innovation Best Practice award.

This brings out a fourth Unified C of Unified Business: Unified Community (joining Unified Communications-enabled apps, Unified Clients and Unified Collaboration.

In fact the savings are no small change: $1.5M over 5 years, a number referenced by Joel Hackney at his keynote at Nortel user conference.

Customers are getting the facts on Nortel vs Cisco solutions, a key tool being the Nortel Energy Efficiency Calculator.

While Cisco may tell you that the Cisco Energy Tax is temporary (governments say this all the time to get a vote), don’t expect it to go away anytime soon.

I wrote about the Cisco Energy Tax being architecturally rooted and requiring significant product redesign.

But get the total scoop from JT Turgeon of our Ethernet Switching group, and draw your own conclusions.

When asked what his big challenges are, he responded: security and helping execs understand the business benefits of UC.

He lamented a common situation that "Lots of execs don't quite get it". He held an informal poll of the audience and observed that only a third indicated that IT was at the business strategy table.

Getting attention of the C suite requires IT to show quantifiable top and bottom-line benefits. That was also the view expressed by Bob Hafner of Gartner, who was on a panel after the keynote. In the case of SSA, they are targeting hundreds of millions of dollars in savings.

My sense from listening to Tom speak, is that 'he's the man' with the right blend of technology and business savvy to move SSA forward.

This is good news for Americans on their own road to retirement (someday!).

This year the award for Enterprise Transformation for a company with over 1000 employees went to Barclays Bank, who are driving £200M in savings and efficiencies through their Contact Centre Transformation Program

Barclays has worked with Nortel to link 45 worldwide contact center locations. Substantial integration to Barclays own desktop screen pop applications and back end banking systems and workflow systems was also achieved. For example, agents are prompted with the "next best offer" to make to the client.

Barclays and Orlando Regional Health are both testimonials to the benefits of successful execution of Unified Business strategies.

The opening keynote was by Joel Hackney, the President of Nortel’s Enterprise division. He commented that it’s not really about Unified Communications, but about “Unified Business”. In his mind, that’s where the value prop lies.

Later in the day, the notion of Unified Business was really brought home when I spent time with Dr Marc Demers, a surgical oncologist at Orlando Regional Health.

He told me how the patient discharge application developed by Nortel, has advanced patient discharge by an average of 4 hours. He commented that a new bed costs in the order of $1M, so that using beds more efficiently means big savings, and of course better patient service.

Dr Demers stressed that, for him, it’s all about simplification.

This got me thinking about the three Unified Cs of Unified Business:
1. Unified Communications-enabled Applications to accelerate the business process from order entry to discharge.
2. Unified Clients to make life simple for clinicians.
3. Unified Collaboration to enable synchronization of activities to make the discharge happen and get the bed ready for the next patient.

What a great story of alignment between IT and the business.

In fact, in a recent survey, 38% of respondents would do just what you did in item 6.

Hyperconnectivity is coming faster than we had imagined. For my perspective on what this all means for enterprise, I invite you to view and 5-part video podcast I created.

Enjoy.

And that includes enterprises themselves!

After all, every enterprise has suppliers, customers, and partners, who are all part of an expanding ecosystem Increasingly, work will be performed wherever it can be most cost effectively done, with much less regard to the organization of the doer (employee, partner, contractor, open source contributor, whoever). This is very different than the vertically integrated industries of the last century.

What will help make this happen? One word: FEDERATIONS.

Federations are all about extending trust across domains.

Federated unified communications systems will enable effective real-time collaboration anytime, anywhere over any media; and federated SOA-based cross domain business processes will accelerate the delivery of products and services to customers.

Federations will not only impact how work is done, but how it is organized across, what some call, the virtual or Hyperconnected enterprise.

It’s not as far out as you think. For example, Nortel and Microsoft are federated today when it comes to unified communications, selectively exposing presence and directories across these two companies.

Customers have asked me: “Why are Cisco routers and switches such energy hogs?”

The answer lies in how Cisco has architected their products, driven by their network-centric strategy built on IOS. IOS has evolved into a Swiss army knife of functionality, with literally hundreds of features that most enterprises have little use for (I discussed this ‘Feature Creep’ in an earlier posting). Anyone still running DECnet or IPX in their networks?

To deliver on this strategy, Cisco tends to develop their own custom silicon (processors) in many/most of their product designs, with apparently little consideration of energy efficiency. In contrast, Nortel chooses to leverage off the shelf merchant silicon, without sacrificing features or performance. Merchant silicon not only has a smaller energy footprint, but is also on an accelerated price/performance curve.

There is no quick fix to Cisco’s energy woes. Expect Cisco to rev up their marketing machine, with their CEO telepresenting how energy efficient Cisco is (or would like to be!) on every occasion. .

But there is a better way for customers.

Instead of waiting for Cisco to re-architect their products and deliver this to you as a rip-and-replace solution, you can pay 50% less on your energy bill for 2-3 years, AND get better performance and reliability.

This comes from a white paper resulting from a Nortel-funded IDC information worker survey.

This trend is hard to fight (and would be counter-productive) as in many environments, information workers are encouraged to take their work home, and to respond to business-related queries off-hours.

The implications are clear. Personal use and IT support policies will need to be adjusted to reflect this new reality. Security will likewise need to reassessed both in terms of networking and business/customer data retention.

What can you do? Well, for example, technology exists today that allows your employees to publish only their work numbers and still be accessible on their cells; cell numbers can be reserved for personal use.

The focus of the day was demos of some of our pre-product innovative/incubation R&D in areas such as virtual reality conferencing, embedding communications into business apps, and Web 2.0 and beyond.

What became obvious to the group was that Nortel competencies in real-time communications, scalability and reliability, had high value in turning virtual reality technologies into potentially much more user friendly and more powerful business tools.

A recurring theme was that "There is no I, there's only we", in Andy Lippman’s words, who joined us for a good part of the day. He’s mid-way through his sabbatical as a visiting fellow at Nortel from MIT. “Second Life doesn't solve business problem, this does” quipped one of our guests.

Solving business problems is the theme of a white paper I recently wrote on Hyperconnectivity and enterprise transformation.

The first posting resulting from this visit came from Rich Tehrani of TMCnet fame.

Central to our efforts to give you the facts on the Cisco energy tax as compared to Nortel solutions, is the Nortel Energy Efficiency Calculator. This calculator is an engineering planning tool, that not only addressees networking in the data center (the hottest area in Green IT discussions), but also the converged LAN/WAN including IP phones and call servers.

I played with it and it’s a very neat tool..

For example, it includes average industrial energy costs from every US state and from various regions around the world, and automatically calculates heat generation in BTUs and CO2 emissions.

It allows you to assess the relative efficiencies of Nortel and Cisco in wiring closets with a mix of PoE and non-PoE environments. To illustrate the thought that went into the design of the tool, you can also specify the average utilization of phones, since the power consumption is different when you’re talking or not talking. In this regard, a contact center has very different power consumption than a general business office.

One customer case we modeled, for a building with 2500 IP phones, resulted in a 5-year saving of over $630,000 by going with a Nortel solution over one from Cisco.

So get the facts and invite Nortel to the table to assess how the Cisco energy tax is impacting you and what tax avoidance strategies you can use.

A Nortel-funded IDC survey of nearly 2400 information workers around the world found that 16% of them termed 'hyperconnected users' (with another 36% of 'highly connected users' waiting in the wings), rely on and expect a range of mobile, unified communications and social networking capabilities, in their work environments. But user pull for personal productivity tools is not sufficient for a business case to invest in unified communications and related technologies.

What is clearly needed is a business push for these types of group and enterprise productivity solutions, based on opportunities to accelerate the business.

Help is at hand. These same hyperconnected users can act as agents of change within the enterprise to rationalize user pull and business push for unified communications.

One of the customer examples we gave was of a news agency with 3 newspapers in a major US city that replaced their Cisco network with Nortel. During the RFP process, the customer compared proposals from Nortel and Cisco, and chose Nortel. Cisco came back not once but three times (including proposing 4500’s in the wiring closets to meet the need for redundant power), but the preferred solution and the one selected was the Nortel one (we stayed with our original design proposal). Some of the reasons included price/performance, reliability, energy efficiency and TC0.

At first, the CCIEs on staff expressed concern of the new skills required to engineer and operate a Nortel solution. They bluntly said “why change to a new technology platform?” Over 18 months since the decision was made, the CCIE concerns have not materialized. With a couple of days of incremental training, CCIEs were able to apply their extensive skills in Ethernet, IP, routing, VLANs etc to become highly proficient in the chosen Nortel solution.

Bottom-line, reject Cisco FUD that there are huge training hurdles with moving to a Nortel solution.

Something for your next commute. Drop me a not if you have any comments.

Sorry only available in English;(

Cisco’s response #1: market green and hope the customer doesn’t see the Cisco energy tax on his bill.
Cisco’s response #2: start redesigning its products (this probably won’t be just another upgrade).

What’s the customer to do #1: don’t get distracted by Cisco marketing
What’s the customer to do #2: fund your data and/or UC evolution through energy tax savings
What’s the customer to do #3: get the facts and do the math

The down side is that things that don’t deliver business benefit can also be connected.

And today marks the thirtieth anniversary of spam- it first appeared on the ARPAnet on May 3 1978, as an over exuberant entrepreneur tried to promote his products by sending out an unsolicited bulk emailing.

The term ‘spam’ appeared some 15 years later (15 years ago) and has been highly disruptive to residential and business users alike.

According to Spamhaus, 90% of email today is spam with a mere 200 spammers accounting for 80% of this number!

Wouldn’t we all love to take away the privileges of hyperconnectivity from these 200? Unfortunately spam is one cost of openness that hyperconnectivity implies.

The implication for the industry is that there will be a continued requirement for intelligent network and application layer technologies within a layered defense architecture, to counter spam and its relatives (e.g. IM spams sometimes called SPIT).

Sure some of these have been loyal customers since the Bay days and are now moving to the latest and greatest.

But most are swapping out their incumbent vendor (often Cisco) in favor of better performance and resilience, lower energy consumption and/or lower TCO. Yet others are bringing a second vendor (Nortel) into their networking environment as part of a dual vendor strategy. In both these cases, interoperability with the installed base is table stake.

By way of example, the CIO of Fred Weber, a construction and materials supply company in Missouri, whose incumbent data vendor had not been Nortel, said “Quite frankly, we were dead set on another solution, but we listened to Nortel and we were very pleased with what they were able to provide.”

So get the facts and make the best choice for your business.

I’m here at Interop and customers are getting the facts (verified by independent third parties) on Green networking (50% less energy consumption), on performance (20x better), on reliability (7x the resilience) and on TCO (50% reduction) of our networking solutions.

One customer (an educational institution) apparently is stopping an order for $2M of Cisco gear when they heard this story!

The bottom-line is that enterprises need to do due diligence and look at alternatives to Cisco in the data space. That’s exactly what this institution is doing.

Best Practice #1: Develop a Vision and Strategy for Enterprise Transformation. It’s no longer just about how work is done, but how business processes are organized and accelerated for increased effectiveness.

Best Practice #2: Develop a UC business case around how UC accelerates time to X (X= revenue, service, service, product, decision) and business processes in general. This requires you to engage with business owners to understand which user communities and application environments to target.

Best Practice #3: Converge telecom with the desktop for a unified client experience. The telecom and IT industries are converging, as are user expectations.

Best Practice #4: Get control of your mobility environment and drive for business advantage. The future is mobility, but your mobility costs are escalating.

Best Practice #5: Partner with suppliers that will help you unify your UC infrastructure. UC has to be about both client and infrastructure unification, for maximum benefit and lowest TCO.

Best Practice #6: Add multimedia applications to your UC system based on business opportunities. The core of any UC system is IM/presence and telephony, but rich collaboration comes through multimedia applications.

Best Practice #7: Address needs to accelerate key business processes through communications enabled applications. Human latency in existing processes is impacting customer service and increasing business costs.

Best Practice #8: Establish a SOA-based communications enablement environment that will improve agility, accuracy and speed. Vertically integrated single vendor systems will not deliver the agility you need.

Best Practice #9: Invest in critical network infrastructures to deliver consistent quality of experience for UC users and the new generation of applications. With growing enterprise reliance on UC and communications-enabled applications, you need to get the facts about performance, energy efficiency and TCO.

Best Practice #10: Partner with suppliers that have the strategic partnerships in place and the solution breadth and services to plan, deliver and operate solutions that best fit business objectives.

Make sense? What's missing?

In the public network space, you may not be particularly tracking backbone networking technologies being rolled out by service providers. You’ve likely heard of MPLS, but the reality is that, with Hyperconnectivity in enterprise and similar developments in the consumer market (e.g. mobile video, multimedia gaming etc), MPLS networks are becoming way too complex. Provider Backbone Transport (PBT) is one of the key technology responses to these challenges.

BT and Southern Light agree with me.Why? PBT delivers the same predictability and resiliency of traditional SONET-based networks, and is based on a technology you’re more than familiar with: Ethernet. It can be used as the foundation of an end-to-end service (e.g. in metro areas) or as an on-ramp to MPLS WANs.

As I have said many times, Hyperconnectivity demands network simplification, with increased real-time performance, scalability and reliability. PBT is an important part of the equation, as are 4th gen wireless technologies such as 801.11n and WiMax.

In fact, some of our larger enterprise customers are looking at what PBT can do for them in their internal networks!

I hadn’t heard the term reverse-911 before, but it’s very much of a class of applications that can be communications enabled to speed up processes.

Reaching out to all employees during a natural disaster is hopefully a once in a blue moon scenario, but what about reaching out to emergency response teams and directing those that are closest to the emergency and have the requisite skills and equipment to deal with it in the most effective fashion? In a hospital environment, code reds happen relatively frequently.

With the proliferation of devices and communications modes (telephony, IM, email) and introduction of location tracking capabilities and presence, notification services can become much richer and more intelligent than ‘brute-force’ telephony-centric reverse-911 systems today.

A key enabling technology is a SOA-based communications enablement framework, such as Nortel’s recently announced Agile Communications Environment which in its first substantiation is based on IBM’s Websphere, which can interoperate with multiple vendors’ communications systems across enterprise and carrier environments.

Notification is but one important class of communications-enabled applications. Do you have a plan in place to accelerate your business?

With the emergence of software-centric unified communications, tightly integrated not only with email, calendaring and directories, but also with desktop applications and over time with business processes, it will be very interesting to watch how CIOs organize around this inevitability.

In fact, organizations designed for the 90’s could be an encumbrance to accelerated acceptance of UC and communications-enabled applications.

IT convergence changes not only how work is done, but how work is organized.

So where do you see going organizationally in 2008?

Delivering end-to-end real-time performance for UC users and for time-sensitive sensor/actuator applications is a key challenge. Time-sensitive applications must operate within an end-to-end delay window (150 msec for human communications, but potentially much less for telemetry). These applications can’t tolerate packet loss because there’s no time to retransmit.

This drives the deployment of comprehensive traffic-management mechanisms (including QoS) to ensure that real-time traffic always receives priority treatment even in the presence of data traffic bursts. While achieving this across the bandwidth-rich LAN environment is relatively straight forward, doing it across WLANs additionally requires low-latency seamless-roaming and application-based load balancing across APs. Achieving real-time performance across the WAN mandates the elimination of speed bumps when crossing the MAN and the WAN by leveraging technologies such as carrier-grade Ethernet.

Is your network ready to support a broad range of real-time applications?

That’s the scenario described by Phil Edholm, the Nortel Enterprise CTO, in his blog, based on technologies in the our Contact Center 6.0 application, to integrate real people into Second Life as on-demand avatars.

This is just another example, that your customers want to have the flexibility to interact with you over whatever channel they want, whether it be in person, over the Internet, over the phone and now even from Second Life!

Did you hear about the lady in Chicago who placed a 911 call from one of a two building small campus. She died when the first responders went to the wrong building!

This podcast features Mark Fletcher, who is the chairman of the PBX/Multi-Line Telephone System technical subcommittee of the National Emergency Number Association (NENA). It’s 16 minutes long and could save your life;)

In January of 2008, TMCnet experienced 38,368,961 page views, with over 2.4 million unique visitors, each of which stayed an average for 28 minutes and 59 seconds this past month. In the past, 60% of the visitors were from outside the US. These numbers are nothing like what Google attracts with 129M unique visitors (according to Quantcast), but they are pretty big for a site that’s dedicated to a particular industry.

Without readers like you, this would not be possible.

Thank you and come back real soon;).

So who needs a spell checker for IMs?

What if you include a sugar intake monitor for when you’re watching the game. MyCouch!?