Nortel Buzzboard

I’m here at the show. This morning is the opening session. Steve Ford - the President of INNUA - will start things off. Then Joel Hackney, president of Enterprise Solutions for Nortel. The Steve Bandrowczak, CIO of Nortel. I’ll try to keep up with the comments and presentations as much as possible and post updates here.

The below bullets are in reverse chronological order, with the most recent updates on top:

• Steve Ford (INNUA president) just wrapped the opening session. I’m done for a bit while my fingers rest and my battery recharges. We do have a guest post from Joel Hackney going live in a bit so be sure to check back for that soon.
• Steve B just wrapped his speech.
• Steve Bandrowczak: What about security? We are looking at security (in the Nortel network) from a layered defense strategy. Today within Nortel we have a single sign-on for voice, video, data, and applications. One single sign-on for all applications. End-point security, how do you deal with some of the challenges - for instance automatic patching. 80% of all our inbound email is spam, 95-97% is blocked We’ve reduced viral infections by 70% in the last 3 years.
• 10:50am ET - Steve: Virtualization is gaining in maturity, and no question in 3 years most of our voice and data infrastructure will be consolidated down into a single data center. We are seeing significant benefits around virtualization. Around maintenance costs, real estate costs, around infrastructure. You have the ability to centralize more than you think.
• Steve: Now our UC strategy and implementation. we didn’t do this overnight, it was an evolution. Phase 1 was the move to VoIP. Real benefits here, today I can have my office phone ring and it will ring to my laptop here at the show. As you think about your UC strategy, it’s not just about voice, video and data - it’s about taking those communications and integrating them into your business processes. Some benefits of UC we are seeing at Nortel. $5M/year savings from MCS audio-conferencing. $5M/year in estimated travel avoidance from video conferencing, 40-70% reduction in move/add/change costs for employees. Bottom line is a $12M+ savings for Nortel with a 10 month RIO from our UC efforts.
• Steve: So what are some of the things we are doing internally at Nortel? Take mobility. We have over 24K employees using laptops. 84% used VPN access, 78% used our MCS/VoIP client. VoIP reduces calling card and LD charges by 57% for execs, 42% for sales, and 90% for telecommuters. Telecommuters helps us avoid $22M in real-estate costs. 8,000 employees use our WLAN every month.
• Steve: it’s a commodity to deliver network access, we have to deliver significant value to the business on top of that. Here at Nortel, we are trying to align with the business. How do we drive shareholder value? That’s how we know we are successful…how can IT do that? Help with incremental revenue…how do we drive more efficiency, better cycle times? Simplifying our internal processes can drive efficiencies, reduce costs.

• 10:34am ET - Steve: All these challenges present a real opportunity to deliver real business value…that’s what I’m going to show you next. Nortel’s network — 240 locations across 59 countries…31K employees worldwide. 34M email messages each month, 34M minutes of voice conversations per month, 20M minutes of MCS audio conferencing per month.
• Steve: We are all proud that bandwidth is going up (in the enterprise) while costs are going down or flat. But now we are being asked to deliver and increasingly “rich” experience. We are being asked to do that not just on a laptop, but on mobile platforms as well. Being able to deliver that experience on any device continues to be a challenge for the CIO.
• Steve: How many of you today had a piece of your business that used to be inside your business that has now been outsourced? Outsourcing is now common — and we have to manage those changes.
• Steve: How many of you have walked away from a budget meeting with more budget than you asked for? Never. You are seen as expensive — you are always being asked to do more with less.
• Steve: we have a break-even role…the best we can do is break-end. If you get through a day and didn’t get an email that the network is down, then that was a good day. We are expected to be perfect - zero down time.
• [Just uploaded a few more pictures to the bottom of this post]
• Steve: I’m speaking to you not as a Nortel employee, but as a peer. I have the same challenges you do.
• Steve Bandrowczak - Nortel CIO is introduced.
• 10:20am ET - Joel is wrapping up his speech now.
• The noise around changing from TDM to VoIP and UC isn’t changing - the difference is the value proposition is.
• 3) foundation for UC - Professional services - Nortel owns 35% of all Microsoft OCS certifications.
• 10:15am ET - Joel: there are a lot of ways to measure progress. We are proud that Gartner Group has put us in the leaders quadrand (in their Magic Quadrant) for UC.
• 2) foundation for UC - Communications Software and Applications: for example our new SCS 500, IVR/CC, and partnerships with Microsoft and IBM. You can’t do it alone, our partnerships with Microsoft and IBM are delivering tremendous value.
• Green IT - chart that shows that 81% of respondents to an IDC survey are looking for green products that reduce OPEX - it’s the OPEX reduction that they are interested in. (see related post I had about this topic here). Nortel now has tools to help you do an energy efficiency analysis to see what deploying a Nortel solution can do for your network.
• 1) Purpose-built data networks - UC puts demands on the data network. Unless you have a data network purpose-built for UC, you won’t see all the benefits you can from UC. Nortel’s data networks have been independently tested to show 20x better performance, 50% less cost, 50% better energy efficiency.
• Joel: foundational components for UC: you need three things –
• Joel mentioned that Bob Hafner of Gartner Group will be speaking at the show. Didn’t know that — and I’ll have to make sure I attend that session.
• 10:03am ET - Joel: speed is the competitive advantage everyone is looking for. By applying UC and real-time collaboration, we have seen 14-27% improved time-to-revenue cycles. One of the reasons why I believe the world has changed - the need has been there for some time, but the cost to enable some of these technologies is now making it possible to deploy. The cost has been a hindrance. For instance something like call routing intelligence - the problem is the cost in the past has been preventative. The economics of UC now make it viable. The technology is now reaching a point with UC, with SOA, with web services, to move the model from a huge investment across multiple systems to moving to a central model, cutting the training dramatically…
• Joel: There are companies that are addressing these challenges. One of them is Orlando Regional Healthcare. They had limited resources as costs were increasing. They new the old way wasn’t going to work. Let’s here from them directly (video) …. now showing a customer testimonial with Orlando Regional Healthcare… you can see a PDF of ORHC’s story here…and actually here’s their case study page on nortel.com where you can see the video we are watch (how’s that for virtually being at the show).
• 9:55am ET - Joel: 70% of voice communications end up in voicemail. Think about what that does to business process. 100+ messages are received by the average business worker per day - received across sever or more devices. All this boils down to this - 93% of customers experience business delays due to the inability to get to the right person at the right time to make a decision.
• Joel: Ask 10 people what the definition of UC is and you’ll get 12 answers. But really it’s about Unified Business.
• Joel: recent survey - of INNUA members - that 78% of users planned to transition to UC in the next 2 years. Why? The need for it is overwhelming. And the technology has improved to a point where it can be done without adding another level of complexity to the network.
• Joel: What’s lacking with all this new technology is one thing — simplicity.
• Joel: Demands on the CIO are increasing tremendously - how do we make technology more relevant to our business process. How do we take technology and use it to impact business processes like we have never before.
• We’ve also talked a lot about the transition of technology itself - TDM to VoIP. It’s no surprise that your roles - the CIOs role - is tougher than it’s ever been.
• Joel: We are truly at an inflection point with Hyperconnectivity. You’ve hear that in the past - in the past it may have been marketing, but has never been more real than today. The number of network connections is exploding, and is adding a level of complexity.
• 9:45am ET - Joel: Some stats on INNUA members - 78% have purchased in the past year. Companies are purchasing voice and data.
• Three times increase in new members this year versus this time last year for INNUA.
• 9:42am ET - Joel: end user attendance for Global Connect is up 41% versus last year at a time when travel is being restricted.
• Steve asked the INNUA board of directors to stand and thanked them. Steve is now introducing Joel Hackney, president of Enterprise Solutions for Nortel.
• New website is coming for INNUA.
• 9:40am ET - Global Knowledge is INNUA’s premier sponsor. New training packages are coming through this partner.
• More than 500 new companies join membership in the last couple of months. Increased membership more than 5% YTD. Several chapters have doubled in size.
• Attendees from around the world. In fact, we have more than 60 attendees from Denmark alone.
• Steve thanked April Miller of Nortel - the Nortel liason to INNUA - for her help with the event and INNUA membership.
• Steve Ford, INNUA President, is now speaking.
• And now the “Texas” part of the event shows - we’re watching a video of a cowboy (his cowboy hat) in his truck, and full with longhorn steer - telling us about what we can expect from the event.
• There are over 130 vendors exhibiting this year, with the exhibit hall reception opening the area this evening (and I’ll be there).
• Over 100 Insight 100 customers are also attending this year’s event.
• Some pictures below of the main ballroom.
• VOG says the session is about to begin.