December 2007 Archives

In my last blog, I talked about disconnecting my desktop phone. Here’s my 3 reasons why this is the exception rather than the rule in today’s world.

#1 Ease of use: familiar look and feel of a phone, including use of a handset, hands-free operation, and numeric key pad. IP phones with multi-line (and even color bit-mapped displays) and USB ports have taken this to new levels.

I have always had a desk phone over my 36 year career. Until last Friday!

Firstly, a VT100 dumb terminal (sort of a very thin client running at 1200 bps) and a phone; then an IBM 3270 running off of a mainframe and a phone; then a Mac and a phone; then a PC and a phone; and, over the last number of years, a laptop docking station, monitor and a phone.

My office phone has been a constant companion, and kept me in touch some 300,000 times over those years.

Let’s look a little further out from the Gartner Enterprise Networking Summit. I took back three messages:

1) Dr. Lippman of MIT said during his keynote: “Technology doesn't change things; society does. It's out of our hands". "It's not about products but about architectures, tools and enablers".

The recurring conference theme: the job of IT and how we approach this challenge/opportunity is fundamentally changing. These challenges and opportunities arise from a megatrend, we call Hyperconnectivity.

My personal highpoint: describing our joint UC solutions to a room filled to capacity with MSFT customers and being able to address the needs of both Nortel voice and non-Nortel voice enterprises with the broadest UC solution in the industry. And then having Mike Lucas of Indiana U describe his deployment of the MSFT-Nortel UC solution on a very large scale.

One of the greatest impacts of Hyperconnectivity is in the security area.

Multiple approaches to security enforcement should be used in different parts of the network, operating under enterprise-wide policies. This ‘layered defense’ is further bolstered by adopting an open-security philosophy that embraces a security ecosystem leveraging security leaders such as Symantec, Check Point and Sourcefire.

I recently spoke to an Israeli financial institution that was experiencing 25,000 attacks per day (not a typo!).

Hyperconnectivity will make the enterprise more dependent on its network than ever before. Real-time UC, security, building management, telemetry, asset tracking and hazmat management will drive the need for real-time reliable networks with extremely fast restoration times to avoid impacting these applications when failures occur.

In November Cisco introduced its Virtual Switching System (VSS), which they claim to be 'innovative'. The good news is that Cisco finally acknowledges that their legacy approaches (e.g.

In my Oct 22 posting "Beware the Single Vendor as Trusted Advisor: Gartner", I discussed with you the pitfalls of single vendor networking. Well opportunity knocks and I had a chance to debate Cisco on this hot topic.

Take a look and tell me what you think about dropping Cisco in favor of best in breed vendors.

Let's talk about Hyperconnectivity and network implications of unified communications and of an explosion in network-connected devices - for example, in the realms of energy and property management, asset and location tracking, telemetry and enhanced security systems. This is enabled by low-cost sensors and actuators that can detect over 100 different physical parameters, including temperature, radiation levels, door closures, visual and audio signals and location - and that can cost-effectively transmit this information.

Scaling the network by a factor of 10 to 100, the most obvious of a number of new requirements, can’t be achieved without fundamentally streamlining current network environments. Hyperconnectivity demands simplification on a grand scale, transforming the network into a business optimized infrastructure.