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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. He is now vice president of technical infrastructure of the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games (VANOC). He observed that "The infrastructure that we're building for the Games is roughly the same complexity and size as what we had deployed there (in the bank). But what we're doing here for the Games is like opening all the branches on the same day, with all the systems working. And it has to run perfectly. Customer transactions can't go wrong, and we have to balance every night."

Both these professional have another thing in common. In both cases, they have turned to Nortel. LOCOG has partnered with Nortel as its Official Network Infrastructure and Sustainability Partner, while Nortel is the Official Converged Network Equipment Supplier for the 2010 Winter Games.

The Olympic Games, like running a financial institution, are among the most demanding communications environments in the world. The big difference is that the deadline to go live is absolutely fixed and un-negotiable, and transactions cannot be re-entered under any circumstance (you can't ask a sprinter to break the world record again, because we missed the first time!)

Think about it. Nortel is one of the few companies (I would say only) with deep expertise in more areas (wired/wireless, enterprise/service provider and infrastructure/applications), needed to flawlessly deliver reliable mission critical networks Olympians can rely on. Olympics are banking on it.

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.

Three important requirements need to be considered:
1. Degree of customization: how valued is the relationship with the customer and what is it worth to the business?
2. Degree of personalization: Matt talks about control- so what degree of personalization is offered to the customer to satisfy his needs and preferences?
3. Degree of differentiation: How will your business differentiate itself in the marketplace?

While point solutions are always a possibility, the savvy hyperconnected enterprise looks at technologies as enablers of more engaging and differentiable services. What does this imply in practical terms: agile communication and application environments which are software-centric, multi-vendor and cross-domain, and open.

What to avoid: single vendor, vertically integrated and network-centric technologies that will constrain service innovation.

How are your customer service strategies changing with customer expectations?

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?

Take another example. I have spoken of accelerating the business by eliminating human latency. This will be done by providing employees with the ability to initiate communications directly from within an application they are using, or having business processes reach out to employees and groups who are in the best position to expedite the decision. In both cases, the user experience can be significantly enhanced through context, which can include their role and what they need to know, what they are doing, and where they are.

As communications and IT converge in a software-centric world, communications enabled business processes and applications will significantly change the customer experience and increase enterprise productivity.

Nortel technologists are exploring these opportunities today.

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. 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.

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.

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!).

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. 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.

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.

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.

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. 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.