Nortel Buzzboard

Vacationers on the Greek island of Patmos will soon have free island-wide wireless Internet access. (photo credit patmos.com)It’s the middle of summer (for those of us north of the equator), and for many that means prime vacation season. But for an increasing number of workers, a vacation might mean some time on a sunny beach, but not necessarily a break from work duties.

One of the interesting findings of an IDC study that Nortel sponsored (The Hyperconnected: Here They Come) was that over one third of people surveyed check work email when on vacation.

Indeed it seems beaches everywhere are getting connected. The Greek island of Patmos is in the middle of an island-wide wireless mesh deployment that will give residents and vacationers alike free mobile Internet access. The project was initiated under the leadership of Nicholas Negroponte, co-founder and former chairman of the MIT Media Lab, and Michail Bletsas while both were at the Lab. When Negroponte isn’t revolutionizing the PC industry, he also has a home on Patmos and visits often. For more on the Patmos network visit here.

It’s a bit of a light news day, so I figured I’d promote a Nortel video that recently won an award. This video highlights all the wonderful skills and expertise of Nortel Global Services.

In June, the Business Marketing Association (BMA) of New York City gave out it’s annual ACE awards. There were 436 entry submissions across a variety of categories, and this Nortel video (created by nFusion) won in the “Inventive Media” category.

Corporate America is often guilty of bandwagon jumping. If it’s a hot trend, you can be sure companies across America will soon saturate the market with new products or marketing designed to take advantage of the latest public consciousness.

That’s pretty much what greenwashing is all about. The South Beach and Atkins diet fads resulted in an upheaval in food products and advertising. And who can forget the millions of copycats created from the success of the Livestrong wristband.

And you can’t talk about the bandwagoning of Corporate America without having blogging at the top of the list.

It’s a Web 2.0 world, and businesses of all kinds are jumping on the blogging bandwagon. And why not — there are some real benefits to be gained through the use of corporate blogging. However, as this WSJ blog post highlights, most corporate blogs can be considered nothing more than “unimaginative failures” that are “boring as paint.”

Of course - Nortel too has been jumping on the blogging bandwagon. This here Buzzboard news blog is just five months old, and since then we have a new Voice Security blog, and Nortel’s Matt Konwiser is now blogging on Network World.

But you know something has really gone mainstream when it shows up on the national nightly news. Tonight on NBC News there was the below segment on how corporations, and even CEOs, are getting into blogging — including the CEO of Marriott, who writes his blog posts out by hand with good old-fashioned pen and paper.

So how is Nortel doing with our blogging efforts? Are we boring as paint? Are there areas or topics that you think we should address that we don’t? And what are we doing right that you’d like to see more of?

Will the day ever come when your average white collar worker won’t have a phone at his (or her) desk?

Earlier this week IDC put out a press release entitled “IP Telephony Holds Strong in the Face of Unified Communications (UC) Hype,” highlighting the findings of their 2007 IP Telephony report.

IDC says IP-PBX and IP Phone shipments remained strong in 2007, even with the introduction of desktop unified communications solutions last year from Microsoft and IBM. The absence of a cratering IP-PBX market shouldn’t be much of a surprise to anyone — even Microsoft doesn’t expect people to rip out their phone systems and replace them with OCS anytime soon. As a precaution though, IDC recommends getting cozy with Microsoft and IBM (done and done).

IDC also says UC and UC mobility solutions are threats to the IP phone market, and recommends that vendors “assess how the adoption of UC software clients may diminish the importance of the desktop phone.”

Will softphone clients like this one make IP phones obsolete?But with so much of the corporate world still moving from old-world TDM to VoIP, aren’t the productivity improvements and functionality of unified communications a driver for VoIP (and IP Phone) adoption? Or is there a possibility that businesses throw out the often pricey desk phone completely and just go straight to softphone clients?

Just today, Nortel announced a new deployment with The School of Management at Fudan University, one of China’s oldest educational institutions. New IP phones were part of the deal, but the school will also use softphone clients for teachers who travel extensively.

Personally, I no longer have a desktop phone. When I made the move from office worker to teleworker a year ago, my desk phone didn’t come with me. One year after my move, I still use a soft-client provided by Nortel MCS 5100 to make all my phone calls through my PC (using either a headset or a mic and speakers). I also still don’t have a direct connection to a printer — so I’m either too progressive or too lazy to have set up either.

So what is UC to the IP phone — a boom or a bane?

You might not think that Nortel is in the business of making high-speed rail safer, but that’s what Nortel announced yesterday in one of several customer win announcements released.

If you live in the U.S. or Canada, you’re probably not that familiar with GSM-R technology. As its name indicates, GSM-R is built on the GSM wireless standard popular around the world. But while GSM is a legacy wireless standard soon to be replaced with newer 3G and 4G technologies, GSM-R is a relatively new standard specifically targeted to railway networks (more detail here).

The GSM-R standard is a digital replacement for today’s hodge-podge of mostly incompatible analogue railway radio networks. It requires fewer base stations (lower CapEx), supports voice and data, enables communications as higher speeds (up to 500km/h), and supports features such as emergency broadcast, auto train control, and passenger comm services. Together, this results in a train that can safely go faster, with a less costly and more robust communications network.

Yesterday Nortel announced GSM-R contracts for two new railway lines in Algeria. It turns out that Nortel is the number one GSM-R provider globally, supporting 60% of the more than 115,000 km of tracks worldwide using GSM-R.

In a separate release Tuesday, Nortel announced that Bahamas Telecommunications Company, the primary telecom operator in the Bahamas, was using Nortel to upgrade their wireless network from TDMA to GSM, and would also use Nortel EDGE technology for increased mobile data download speeds.

Not to be outdone, Bermuda Telephone Company is using Nortel carrier VoIP technology to provide new fixed mobile convergence capabilities to their customers. For example, subscribers will have the ability to have calls rerouted from their wireless service to their voicemail or home phone.

All of this begs the question, is there anywhere left in the world where you should expect not to have connectivity?

When Nortel CTO John Roese speaks, people listen. Not only is he a brilliant guy, but he also holds the reigns to Nortel’s approximately $1.7 billion in annual R&D spend.

This Spring, Roese has already been busy talking up the accomplishments Nortel’s R&D organization has made, and where we are going.

Yesterday on his blog, Roese provided some additional color and detail on his R&D focus going forward. The post is centered on a recent Nortel Technical Conference — an internal Nortel R&D event last month in Orlando that brought together 300 of Nortel’s brightest R&D minds. But since the purpose of the conference is to focus Nortel’s R&D experts on what Nortel can deliver for our customers, it provides some good insight into areas that Roese will have Nortel’s R&D engine working on.

In his post, Roese says that “Our biggest opportunity lies in the creation of new applications and the communications-enablement of existing IT applications.”

Indeed, this is focus on the software and applications side of things is something he and Nortel CEO Mike Z have been reinforcing for some time now. John’s post, however, provides some color on how he expects Nortel to make progress there. He also provides an interesting list of examples of applications being developed.

One application he mentions is an “Emergency Response Solution” that better brings together the technology and people needed for emergency situations, ultimately saving time and lives. This one caught my eye, because a Nortel demo of it was on display at Global Connect last month. I even took a little video of the demo in action, which you can see below (note - click through to YouTube to see the video with annotations added).

The Nortel and Microsoft Innovative Communications Alliance (ICA) has a new public customer today — arvato systems — one of the first ICA customers in Germany. arvato systems provides clients with IT services supporting the the use, management, and distribution of media (such consulting, concept design, development, implementation, and operation). This is a natural extension of their parent company, global media and communication services provider arvato AG.

Their new UC network pulls together voice, email, conferencing, video and instant messaging into a single interface (Microsoft OCS 2007). But it’s the services side of this deployment that makes it an interesting win.

In our UC alliance with Microsoft, Nortel has emphasized the services revenue potential that the relationship brings (as well as the alliance’s ability to generate revenues on related Nortel enterprise solutions). arvato systems is an example of how Nortel services are involved.

Nortel services helped arvato across three areas: planning and consulting, design and integration, and roll-out of the solution.

arvato’s network management teams used an ICA Collaboration Center to collaborate on all business and technical aspects of successfully rolling out their UC network. Next, Nortel’s services group delivered a network and integration plan down to the component level. Nortel then worked with Gold Solution Partner DeTeWe Communications GmbH to provide hardware and consulting services for the roll-out and integration of the solution, including an upgrade and customization of arvato system’s existing Nortel IP-PBX and components of the Microsoft solution.

Analyst firm In-Stat says that the practice of using custom ASICs by some equipment vendors is putting them at a disadvantage for energy efficiency.

In an Information Alert published last month entitled “Going Green - Network Equipment Vendors Address Energy Efficiency,” In-Stat says that:

Vendors who are already designing equipment with advanced off-the-shelf silicon solutions will have an advantage. These vendors will benefit from both favorable regulations and the technological know-how of large chip vendors like Broadcom, who offer solutions with significantly higher energy efficiency and processing capacity.

To quickly break down what that means - the term “off-the-shelf silicon solutions” refers to an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC), which is basically a microchip that is designed for a specific use. For example, there are ASICs for cell phones, switches and routers, and many other needs.

As In-Stat highlights, there are chip vendors like Broadcom that specialize in ASIC design and manufacture, and their expertise enables them to create chips that offer “significantly higher energy efficiency and processing capacity.” We call these “off-the-shelf ASICs,” basically mass-produced customized microchips.

Not everyone uses off-the-shelf ASICs though. Some vendors - such as Cisco - create “Custom ASICs” to provide specialized functionality. While some may attempt to argue that there are benefits to custom ASICs, energy efficiency definitely isn’t on the list of possible advantages.

For a while now, Nortel has been highlighting the energy efficiency advantages of off-the-shelf ASICs (which we use in our enterprise data products). I talked to John Gray at Global Connect not long ago and he highlighted this. Phil Edholm (here) and Tony Ryb (here) made the same argument with posts on their blogs as well.

Now there’s an industry analyst firm that is making the argument too. By the way, the In-Stat report also gives Nortel’s recent energy efficiency efforts some praise, saying “To date, Nortel is the only vendor to offer the industry a network equipment efficiency metric and to demonstrate that some solutions are more energy efficient than others.”

To get more detail on off-the-shelf versus custom ASICs, take a look at the below video. Jean Turgeon (JT) is Nortel’s director of PLM for our enterprise data solutions, and a resident expert on ASICs and energy efficiency.

Yesterday I highlighted the availability of the new online interactive Nortel Energy Efficiency Calculator (iNEEC). The other part of the news in yesterday’s press release was to show that enterprise customers were increasingly considering product energy efficiency when making their network purchase decisions.

If you’ve been following this blog for a while, that may seem like old news since Nortel has been claiming this since Interop. But yesterday’s release provides actual customer and channel partner affirmation that energy efficiency really is top-of-mind.

For example, Sean O’Hara, manager of Systems Engineering at Prairie Cardiovascular said, “Not only were we able to achieve a highly redundant network core, we realized a significant savings of both power and heat-generation by using Nortel’s ERS line of switches. We used the Nortel Energy Efficiency Calculator and found we could save thousands of dollars over competing approaches over five years using Nortel’s energy efficient products in our data and communications centers.”

Channel partner Ronco Communications and Electronics is also seeing the change, says John Wrona: “Energy efficiency is top of mind among many customers, and the ability to chart their energy needs now is an extremely important consideration for purchasing decisions.”

How much will energy efficiency influence your next network purchase decision? Have you used the new iNEEC, and if so, what do you think of the results?

Here on Buzzboard we’ve talked a lot about the Cisco Energy Tax and Nortel energy efficiency. Part of that conversation has been around a wonderful but hard to find little tool called the Nortel Energy Efficiency Calculator (NEEC) that allows you to compare Nortel and Cisco energy efficiency.

A star at tradeshows and customer meetings, the NEEC has been hard to bring to the masses because its original incarnation was as a very sophisticated interactive Excel spreadsheet.

Until now.

Today, Nortel announced that the NEEC is now the web-based Interactive NEEC (iNEEC of course) and available online for anyone to use. I have tried out the iNEEC myself and it’s quite a tool — allowing you to calculate potential savings based on your specific per-kilowatt-hour energy costs in 49 countries and all 50 states in the U.S. It gives you the simplicity of “auto-building” a network comparison, but the flexibility to build your own network down to the individual stackable PoE switch.

Try it and you’ll be impressed — both with the tool and with the money you can save. You can also watch the below video, where our own iNEEC expert Steve Given takes you through a guided tour of the tool.