February 2008 Archives

Google is partnering with San Francisco to provide free phone numbers and voicemail boxes to homeless individuals. In my mind, this is a very insightful solution to a problem that every city in the world is facing: reaching the homeless and giving them a communications tool to allow them to help themselves. It allows the homeless to cross the ‘communications divide’ by giving them a communications identity that can be so important in receiving social services, or getting a job.

After all, Hyperconnectivity provides connectivity to all who ‘could benefit from being connected’. Thanks to the City of San Francisco and Google for their inspired leadership.

You may have seen the story about Duke University plans to cover its campus with a pre-standard 802.11n wireless network. Quoting its CIO: "We expect the campus-wide 802.11n wireless network to increasingly be the primary mode of connectivity for data access and mobility applications." This is a great example of an enterprise, implicitly embracing Nortel’s unwired enterprise vision.

The CIO of Duke went on to say that "Universities are an ideal testing ground for new technologies." So should you jump into pre-standard 11n testing ground to duke it out with this new technology?

Duke is one of the 1% of enterprises that are going with pre-standard 11n because they truly need the higher bandwidths and are willing to take the risk.

The benefits of the Patient Discharge application highlighted by Orlando Regional Health in this YouTube video include financial, quality, patient safety and efficiency benefits. See for yourself. And there's no reason why other hospitals couldn't deploy this application so that others could experience it for themselves.

How many cases do you know of, in which a patient in a hospital knows they will be discharged on a particular day, as do the ward nursing staff, but the actual discharge takes place only after hours of sitting around and waiting. The problem is that the doctors required to authorize the discharge are often reached only after the nurse has made 10 to 12 calls. This has changed for the better at Orlando Regional Healthcare, through the communications enablement of clinical applications.

M.

Well, the blogsphere is a wonderful space.

After my original Nexus is no Lexus posting of Feb 13, Brad Reese of Network World picked it up, and that generated a response from Cisco and a further comment from me.

Two highlights:
1) In November, Cisco announced VSS, touted for non-stop communications and bandwidth scalability; now it tells us that it won’t be supported on Nexus (in contrast to Nortel’s proven end-to-end architecture based on MultiLink Trunking; end to end means wiring closet to aggregation to core).
2) Energy efficiency will be the subject of lots of marketing claims and misinformation (see my last posting). Third party validation is key for enterprises to make the right decisions.

I can take a certain amount of ‘creative’ marketing; e.g. how many vendors claim leadership in any given area. However a recent white paper* by Cisco titled “Reduce Power Consumption Through Integrated Services Delivery” is frankly an insult to the intelligence of IT professionals with its intentionally misleading logic.

Cisco’s mathematically precise, energy consumption comparison of their branch integration solution with the AVERAGE of 6 unnamed competitors, with one or more unnamed appliances (to deliver multi-service functionality), is like saying your favorite team is leading in the division of 10 teams because it has won more games than the average of 6 other teams!

According to a new survey of 900 SMB and enterprise decision-makers in the US, France and the UK, Converged Mobility (also called Fixed Mobile Convergence or FMC) is the new service SMBs are most likely to consider from a service provider. Converged mobility is the ability to make phone calls over WiFi and cellular networks via a dual-mode phone.

There are a couple of important reasons why SMBs and enterprises are interested in Converged Mobility. One is that employees of big and small companies are increasingly mobile and want a true broadband experience for voice and data wherever they are.

Lexus has a reputation as a high quality, high performance, high reliability automobile. How does the recently announced Cisco Nexus 7000 stack up to its near-namesake?

High quality right? The Nexus is a new technology for the core data center, with new hardware and a new unproven OS (they call it release 4.0, but this isn’t very convincing).

Hyperconnectivity is with us and people take different approaches to cope with the challenges. As Mike Zafirovski, Nortel’s CEO, says “Technology has left us all with a chronic case of attention deficit disorder and we are all hard-pressed to find the time and peace for an uninterrupted read of even a newspaper.”

So how are organizations coping with these challenges?

Citizenship and Immigration Canada has asked all employees to implement a "BlackBerry blackout" between 7 p.m. and 7 a.m.

One of our customers told us: “We have a strong focus on being environmentally friendly and helping to improve the world we live in. It is in our strategic objectives that, the environment and sustainability will be a key element of our business proposition."

Gartner estimates that companies in the U.S. spend as much as 10% of their total IT budgets on power and cooling. Most of the discussion on Green IT has been with respect to the data center, which Gartner estimates represents over 23% of global carbon dioxide emissions from ICT.

In my Oct 29 blog, I joked about Microsoft merging with Google. Yesterday, I got a Forester Research Update stating unequivocally that “Among the four large software vendors, Microsoft has been the least active in making significant acquisitions of midsize or large vendors, and we don't expect that to change.”

Well, the cat is out of the bag surprising many experts (some call the result Micro-hoo) - $44B is hard to fathom. I personally don’t think Yahoo! is worth a penny over $43.99!

Of course, what $44B proves beyond any doubt (no news here) is that Microsoft views Google as a major threat (while Google has over 90% share of search in some EEC countries, I’m sure that Google has an eye on Microsoft as well).

What’s it like to be the CIO for the Super Bowl? For my non-American readers, the Super Bowl is the World Cup of American Football.

Two years ago, the CIO of Ford Field in Detroit hosted a Nortel customer seminar, a couple of weeks after the 40th Super Bowl was held at his stadium (Pittsburg Steelers 21, Seattle Seahawks 10, Rolling Stones at half time, 68000 fans). When I was there, they were just ‘erasing’ the Steeler logo in the end zone.