Recently in Business aspects Category

Paul Deighton used to be European Chief Operating Officer for Goldman Sachs. So he's well aware of the challenges of running a big business.

Now he's taken on a big job as the CEO of the London Organizing Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOCOG), responsible to deliver all operational plans for the 2012 Games.

Andy Platten also used to work in IT for a very large bank.

The focus of this blog is hyperconnectivity and the enterprise, and that has to include your customers.

Matt Clark, a Principal with Deloitte Financial Advisory Services, had an interesting perspective. What he observes is that consumer experiences with mobile apps "will only increase consumers' expectations to be in control of the decision-making when it comes to the services they want." (Sorry the URL has gone.)

Nothing can be closer to the truth! And the expectations will extend to whatever service delivery channel the consumer prefers: in person, over the phone, through a mobile device or from his/her PC.

Just in from the field: "I had a customer call yesterday and said they wanted to take a closer look at Nortel because they're getting crushed on Cisco maintenance fees for voice. They have about 3,000 IP phones and are paying $400K per year in software maintenance ALONE. They're up to 22 servers supporting 3,000 phones, messaging, and a contact center application."

Looks like the Cisco strategy is to lowball on the hardware (both from a capacity and price perspective) and then hit the customer hard on the back end with more servers, more software maintenance fees and of course the Cisco Energy Tax.

I'm telling customers they need to look at a 5 year TCO with product, maintenance and energy to show the entire picture.

Then there are no surprises and you can apply the savings to business enhancing investments.

Results of a survey of more than 700 corporate managers and CIO and VP-of-IT-level executives provided some insights into the challenges these are facing. Asked "What do you see as the main opportunities before CIOs today?", the No. 1 answer is "improve and/or innovate new business processes."

That's why many are looking at unified communications as more than a personal productivity tool, but as a tool to streamline business processes.

How? you might ask. By leveraging SOA to communications enable business processes, which are slowed down by human latency. This delivers the agility for application innovation and business process acceleration.

I am here in Orlando at the Nortel Technical Conference, hosted by John Roese, our CTO, and attended by 350 of Nortel's brightest technologists.

The theme of the conference is 'Revolutionizing the User Experience', and I'm not just talking about the UC client.

When a customer enters your store or branch, you probably have a 1 in 3 chance of closing the deal, but not so on the web, where you're down to 1 in a 100. What if you could establish a web presence that could dramatically improve this ratio, for example by extending your presence to the consumer's preferred social networking environment, or having the customer enter a 3D world where they can explore your offers and interact with other customers and your service agents?

Nortel is now talking about over 800 wins with Microsoft, with our suite of unified communications solutions and professional services. There are actually ten different solutions being delivered today, including our Converged Office, which integrates the Nortel IP PBX with LCS/OCS.

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.

Tom Hughes, CIO of SSA, had a keynote at the Nortel User Conference, on his perspectives on VoIP and UC. SSA recently signed the largest single VoIP contract valued at $300M, across 64000 employees, 1600 field offices, and a massive contact center; all over 10 years. Tom sees this as putting SSA on the road to UC, a transformational opportunity.

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

Every year, Nortel’s User Group recognizes enterprises that demonstrate the most resourceful uses of developing technologies or service deployment strategies. For Sustained Excellence award went to Orlando Regional Health (yesterday’s blog tells you why).

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.

I’m at the Nortel User Conference, a large international event in Dallas that stretches over 5 days.

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.

I just came back from a 3 day customer session we held in Vancouver, where we had a chance to discuss all aspects of networking and communications with some 20 Nortel customers from across North America. One of the topics was around the training requirements associated with introducing Nortel into a Cisco data network, in some cases, funding this transition by avoiding the Cisco energy tax.

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.