Nortel Buzzboard

Nortel and IDC today issued the results of a new IDC study sponsored by Nortel on the “Exploding culture of connectivity and its impact on the Enterprise.” In other words — Hyperconnectivity.

The accompanying press release highlighted several results in the sub-head, including: “China and the United States have the most Hyperconnected business users.” But then today on his blog, Nortel’s Phil Edholm covers the news with the title IDC Hyperconnectivity Study - Is the US lagging????

The release headline relates to the fact that 16% of those surveyed in he U.S. are Are the numbers wrong, or it is just those darn Canadians weighing down the North American numbers?defined as “hyperconnected users” - those who use a minimum of seven devices for work and personal access plus at least nine applications like IM, text messaging, web conferencing and social networks. Phil’s headline relates to the fact that North America (which consists of U.S. and Canada in this study) had lower levels of use than the rest of the world for instant messaging and SMS texting for business, as well as lower use of blogging, wikis, etc.

How can these two headlines relate to the same study you ask? Are the numbers wrong, or it is just those darn Canadians weighing down the North American numbers?

Fig. 2 from the IDC White Paper - showing percent of hyperconnected and increasingly connected users by region.Well first of all, yes those darn Canadians are weighing down the numbers. While the U.S. had among the highest percentage of hyperconnected users, Canada had the lowest. But that’s not the entire story. While the U.S. had among the highest truly hyperconnected users, North America had the lowest percentage in the world of “Increasingly Connected” uses. You could classify these people as hyperconnected users “waiting in the wings,” and in fact IDC says they are the people that will be responsible for the more than doubling of hyperconnected users over the next five years.

Fig. 1 of IDC White Paper, user classification clusters.

The really interesting analysis you can take from this (Which Tony Ryb enlightened me to in a conversation today) is that while the U.S. can feel good about being a leader today in hyperconnected users, they could be a technology laggard in 5 years (joining Canadians perhaps?) If the numbers and assumptions play out, the shortage of “increasingly connected” users in North America will translate into fewer hyperconnected users in the future — the those classified as “Passive Online” and “Barebones Users” aren’t likely to make up the difference.

To read more about the study results, which includes the figures I used above, go to the IDC White Paper “The Hyperconnected - Here They Come!“, sponsored by Nortel, May 2008.