Earlier this year at Interop, Nortel president of Enterprise Solutions Joel Hackney wrote a guest blog here in Buzzboard about what he was hearing from enterprise customers. As you know, it was at Interop that Nortel really kicked our energy efficiency message into high gear.
Global Connect provides another great opportunity for Joel and Nortel to further connect with our customers. Monday morning, Joel helped kick off Global Connect by speaking to attendees as part of the opening session. Last night - Joel sent some of his thoughts on the event and the trend of customers towards unified communications. Below is his guest blog.
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Joel Hackney, Nortel President of Enterprise SolutionsHere we are in the great state of Texas at INNUA’s Global Connect 2008, the annual international Nortel users’ event. It’s very appropriate that we find ourselves here - everything seems to be bigger in Texas, and that is certainly true of this year’s show.
INNUA is at the top of their game and this year’s Global Connect proves it. Customer attendance is up 41 percent this year and INNUA has had three times as many new users join the organization over the same period last year. This year’s event also features the participation of Insight 100inc, our large enterprise campus users group. Most importantly, this show gives us the opportunity to share ideas, learn from our users and appreciate and address the future needs of our customers.
This is my first Global Connect show. Since joining Nortel’s Enterprise business unit last year, I’ve heard of the event and knew it to be a very powerful forum for us to meet with our users. It is proving to be more than I expected. The feedback to this point from users has been invaluable and confirms that the need has never been greater to deliver order from the chaos of enterprise communications.
Fully 78 percent of enterprises surveyed plan to deploy a unified communications solution within two years. That’s huge, but it isn’t surprising.One thing we know for sure is that unified communications continues to be top of mind. INNUA commissioned an independent survey from Webtorials of more than 800 Nortel users that shows fully 78 percent of enterprises surveyed plan to deploy a unified communications solution within two years. That’s huge, but it isn’t surprising. I’m just curious about the other 22 percent that are putting off the advantages of unified communications.
The end game is really about unified business. It is about simplicity and speed. Integrating communications into business processes simplifies the network and helps eliminate human latency. Consider the business drivers. There are more ways to reach people than ever before and the means to do so are increasing. IM, telephone, cell phone and email are the obvious culprits, but more applications with embedded communications are coming on line. Think supply chain, ERP and CRM applications as well as financial reporting tools added to the mix. At the risk of stating the obvious, the situation is growing more complex.
The increased number of ways to reach people has the undesired consequence of creating even more bottlenecks that impede our ability to communicate. Consider that 70 percent of phone calls end up in a message box. Consider also that people receive, on average, about 100 messages each day across seven or more communications vehicles. The result is that 93 percent of organizations suffer critical business delays because of the inability to reach decision makers. This is a huge drain in productivity and a steep increase in expense - and it is avoidable. That’s where unified communications come in.
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