John Roese’s Blog CTO, Nortel

In this post, I wanted to share with you some of the discussions from our recent 2008 Nortel Technical Conference. This annual conference, which we launched last year, brings together 300 of Nortel’s top engineers and designers from across company. They come together for five days – this year in Orlando, Florida – to network, share innovations, discuss the future, and to focus on some of our greatest opportunities and challenges.

Last year, the focus of the conference was on the atom chart (which I’ve talked about in other posts) and making it real within Nortel. Today, by and large, the company is focused on creating value at the centre of the atom chart, where the six domains of interest (wireline and wireless, enterprise and carrier, and applications and infrastructure) intersect. The intersection point is where things like fixed mobile convergence, wireless backhaul, and telecom/IT convergence happen.

CEO Mike Zafirovski joined us for the Awards Ceremony, where we inducted 4 Nortel Fellows and 12 Distinguished Members of Technical Staff.

The theme of this year’s Conference was “Revolutionizing the End User Experience: How Hyperconnected People Will Live Work and Play.” All of the paper presentations, keynote addresses, poster sessions, panel discussions and workshops focused on some element of this theme. (Having the conference in Orlando was certainly an appropriate venue. It’s a city known for its entertainment and end user experiences, and is living proof (especially with the Kennedy Space Centre) of how technical creativity makes it possible to overcome challenges to achieve big dreams.)

In many ways, I view the Tech Conference as a moment in time where we put a stake in the ground and get the entire R&D community (12,000 strong at Nortel) focused on the bigger picture and the direction we’re heading.

Where we’re heading – and this was a message I think came across clearly at the recent Financial Analyst Conference– is that we are not just focused on the supply side (infrastructure) of Hyperconnectivity, which has been our traditional area of strength (in optical, wireless, Carrier Ethernet, etc.), but also on the demand side (i.e., applications), where we have a real opportunity to be a leader in the converged world of telecom and IT. Our biggest opportunity lies in the creation of new applications and the communications-enablement of existing IT applications. (The chart below shows our key areas of focus on both the supply and demand sides of Hyperconnectivity.)

We will of course continue to focus on the supply side (driving for high-capacity, low-latency, low-cost, abundant bandwidth) to ensure the infrastructure can support the growing number of applications that will ride over it. But an increasing portion of our R&D budget is being directed to the demand side, where we are combining the network capabilities and intelligence that exist in the telecom world (including real-time voice, instant messaging, video, and network capabilities like conferencing, location, presence, proximity, and identity), with the rich world of IT applications. 

Being successful on the demand side requires focus on three key areas, topics that shaped much of the conversations in Orlando: agility, network enablement, and user-centric thinking.

Agility
Although we have more to do, we are making progress by focusing on technology reuse, faster cycle times, and IT standards and tools (like CMMI, agile development, etc.) In terms of reuse, 12% of our designs today use technology that is also used in another Nortel product. That’s up from the low single digits just two years ago, and we have a target of 25%. This focus on reuse is not only lowering costs, but is also speeding our ability to get things out the door more quickly.

We’re also very much focused on reducing cycle times. Our Open Innovation Lab (a small group that’s part of our advanced technology efforts), for example, is exploring new technologies by building prototypes and proof-of-concept demonstrations targeted at revolutionary user experiences. What is most significant about these prototypes/demos, however, is not the actual service itself, but the fact that this building block approach is enabling a new operating model - small tiger teams working hand-in-hand with customers to create new communications-enabled services within weeks versus the months/years it would have taken in the past. This model is also opening up many customization opportunities for our Global Services team.

Network Enablement
The value we bring to the converged IT/Telecom market is world-leading telecom knowledge and understanding. We are experts in real-time communications, and know all about designing for scale, dependability, resiliency, reliability, quality, and availability – characteristics that have not been synonymous with the IT world. These are incredibly important attributes and of distinct value to the end user. My message to the design community during the Conference was that we cannot lose sight of that.

Our focus is on taking the communications functionality and capability that exists in the telecom world and marrying it with the IT world. I’ve talked about this in other posts.

User-Centric Thinking
In order to revolutionize the end-user experience – and to be successful on the demand side - it’s essential that we look at the experience from an end user’s perspective. It sounds obvious, but in a large technology company it’s not always a given, particularly when telecom equipment vendors have historically been two or three steps removed from the end-user.

That thinking is starting to change. A big part of the goal of the conference was to challenge the design community to put the end-user first. Identify the needs that are not being met. Ask the question “How can we make the human experience more productive, more effective, more enjoyable? What’s wrong with healthcare? How can we improve education? Wouldn’t it be great if we could (fill in the blank)… . And then, once the need is identified, work backwards from there.

Nortel used to have (before the telecom bubble burst) a world-leading end-user design capability, led by an internal group called Design Interpretive. Close to 100 individuals that ranged from industrial designers, to sociologists, to psychologists, to graphic designers were all focused on ensuring we were designing with the user of our products in mind, and also the customer’s end user. With the bubble burst, this capability went away, as it did in many other companies in our industry. We are slowly starting to rebuild that capability inside the company, and already are seeing very positive results.

Our challenge – and our goal – is to institutionalize that thinking across the company.

In all areas on the demand side, we’re making progress. We also have scores of examples of applications that are revolutionizing the end-user experience. Here are just a few that are gaining traction with customers:

• a “Rendezvous” service that enables you to plan an event with friends based on your location and their availability, hold a quick conference call that is automatically set up by the system (no one needs to dial in), and provide everyone with directions (which, again, is done automatically by the system);
• a “LiveContact” prototype that makes it possible for users to use their existing phones and any web browser to create an integrated experience with voice, video, IM, application sharing, co-browsing, etc.;
• a “LoneWorker” solution that helps keep social workers who go into potentially hostile environments in constant contact with their supervisors, increasing their safety and, if needed, the response time of emergency vehicles;
• a “Collaboration” solution that uses spatial audio to enable you, when you’re in a conference call, to track each individual’s audio stream, understand who is talking, and engage in sidebar conversations without anyone else on the call hearing;
• a “Delivery Alert” solution that enables you to specify when you would like to be notified (on the device of your choice) that a delivery or service truck is a certain distance from your house, eliminating the need for you to be waiting between today’s typical multi-hour window; and
• an “Emergency Response Solution” that with the click of a mouse brings together all of the technology and all of the people with the right skills who are the closest to the emergency situation, ultimately saving time and lives.

Last year’s Conference yielded tremendous benefits to the company. It got us focused on the atom chart, it resulted in a number of incubation projects, it improved collaboration, etc. Millions of dollars in quantifiable benefit.

I have equally high aspirations for this year. We left the Conference with a better understanding of some of the challenges and opportunities in front of us; tangible action plans from the workshops; new relationships and connections; and the collective will to drive culture change throughout Nortel by focusing our efforts on revolutionizing the end user experience.

In the last few weeks there has been a large volume of dialog around which technology should define the “core packet transport” of the Internet. Mostly that dialog has been focused on the ongoing debate between the MPLS technology camp and the Carrier Ethernet camp. If you are not familiar with this debate I have included (at the end of this post) some links from various trade and other web sites that show the level of passion and, in some cases, hostility in this dialog.  

The reason I point this out is that one easy way to determine the significance of a technical inflection is the level of defensiveness that emerges when a technology is challenged by a viable alternative. I remember when the Token ring camp (which I was involved in) determined that “this Ethernet thing” was not robust, predictable or mainstream enough to be relevant. I also remember when the Novell IPX and DECnet camps argued that Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) was also not sufficiently mature to be used in the corporate world. Obviously they were both wrong and the world moved forward. Today, most new IT people don’t even know what Token ring or IPX or DECnet are (not to mention APPN, LAT, Banyan Vines, AppleTalk, and others).  

What is clear is that the technology that ultimately won each debate and became the common model was the technology that offered the lowest cost, the simplest operating model and the greatest scalability and flexibility to move forward. The industry has always gravitated to technology with those benefits.   

Once again the industry is in this debate. We are debating if the future is about the multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) path or if it will ultimately evolve to a model that is Carrier Ethernet over a high-performance optical layer. At its very core the debate is around whether or not we should use Ethernet to transport Ethernet services or if Ethernet is best transported over another technology, such as IP/MPLS.

Today, the industry is split. There are clearly many MPLS carrier customers, but there is also a rapidly growing number of operators using Carrier Ethernet (more than 40 using Nortel’s gear alone). Additionally, there are millions of enterprise customers using Ethernet as their primary transport technology. The contentious point is that Ethernet as defined by IEEE 802.3 and 802.1 was not initially designed for carrier applications. Today, however, the IEEE 802.1ah (Provider Backbone Bridging), 802.1Qay (Provider Backbone Transport) and 802.1ag (connectivity and fault management) amendments in the standards track are emerging to add the needed carrier services to an Ethernet switched network. With these technologies it is very easy to provide most Ethernet VPN services over large-scale carrier infrastructure at much lower capital cost and a simplified operating model.  

When we look at the MPLS side we see that there is significant active work and a host of draft documents and requests for comments (RFCs), which are the IETF code for a defined and generally accepted specification or document (note that I am simplifying dramatically the IETF standards process, as defined by RFC 2026, as it is easily one of the most rigorous and complex in the industry and, as such, results in very few fully standardized technologies). Even though MPLS has been in existence in some flavor since roughly 1996 (I was at many of the first meetings back before MPLS as a term existed), it is not fully standardized in all dimensions because of both the complexity and the process to solidify its real objectives.  

Additionally, the MPLS model has evolved in terms of what it was originally trying to do. Initially it was designed to accelerate the forwarding of software-based routers. That became somewhat irrelevant as hardware-based routing emerged. The technology then became a mechanism to provide QoS using complex signaling and label stacking. That was of use but largely not used because the industry simply created more capacity and was comfortable with CoS. It then became a technology focused on providing virtualization of subscribers. This is of use but not unique to MPLS; many VPN solutions exist that can do the same thing.

What makes MPLS interesting is that it has a broad set of optional capabilities because it is a conglomeration of many iterative technology streams applied to recreate the TDM carrier network over a packet switched network. It gets even more complex when you look at the actual core of MPLS and realize that there are actually many different approaches under this umbrella, including VPLS, T-MPLS, and a host of other vendor-specific approaches. 

The bottom line is that the MPLS world is a complex space. The MPLS working group (to quote the group’s charter) is “responsible for standardizing a base technology for using label switching and for the implementation of label-switched paths over various packet based link-level technologies, such as Packet-over-Sonet, Frame Relay, ATM, and LAN technologies (e.g. all forms of Ethernet, Token Ring, etc.). This includes procedures and protocols for the distribution of labels between routers and encapsulation.” 

So, why would there be a huge debate over Carrier Ethernet versus MPLS? Three reasons. One, is that the telecom core is still in an evolutionary phase where there has been broad adoption of the various MPLS technologies. Two, most MPLS networks work reasonably well at providing the services they were chosen for over the past decade. And, three, the carrier landscape is usually fairly slow to adopt new technologies because the capital and operating costs of change are nothing to trivialize when one considers the scale of a national or international carrier’s network. Compounding this is the fact that many equipment vendors have made significant investment in both time and dollars to build up MPLS product lines and the idea that this technology investment may not be suitable for one of the most rapidly growing elements of the equipment market (metro networking) is unimaginable.

The bottom line is that there are as many near-term reasons to defend the status quo as there are longer-term reasons to move to an Ethernet over Ethernet technology, such as Carrier Ethernet.

The purpose of this post is not to educate you on MPLS or Carrier Ethernet, but rather to put into context the dialog, which is now front page news every time a customer makes a decision about one of them and every time a product or standard is launched.

Over the next few months, I will try to update the story as it unfolds and add additional context, but for now I ask you to keep in mind that this debate is really no different than many technology inflections of the past. This, too, will unfold with much debate and passion and, like every technology evolution before, we will see a continued movement to simpler, more effective transport and IT systems. The challenge will be in managing the transition and evolution to what is the inevitable. 

References:
IETF MPLS Working Group Link 
IETF Standards Process: 
IEEE 802.1 Web Site 
Face Off: MPLS vs. Carrier Ethernet 
Ethernet Goes Carrier ClassWhat’s
Next for PBT-less BT? 
Analyst: PBT is Not Dead Yet 
Nortel Wins PBB Deal with Verizon

Just a very quick post today, as I sit in the Toronto airport on the way to Washington. I do hope to use the flying time to finish a couple of blog entries I’ve started but haven’t had the time to finish.

In the meantime, I thought you might be interested in a blog entry that Andrew Willis of the Globe and Mail posted today, which you can find here. He offers his thoughts following a meeting that Mike Z, George Riedel, and I had with the Globe and Mail Editorial Board this morning.

You’ve heard me talk in previous posts about the value of the network shifting - becoming less about the ability to move bits and more about the ability to create a truly personalized, immersive communications experience. In this respect, “context” and “identity” are key areas of opportunity for innovation in the infrastructure space.

I’m pleased to share with you another guest blog from Nortel’s Visiting Fellow, Dr. Andrew Lippman, who offers his perspective on this topic. (Andy is one of the founding directors of the MIT Media Lab and is currently with Nortel as part of a year-long sabbatical.) 

Andy Lippman

In the end, there are only two things that are critical in communications: identity and context. Both are complex, and neither is completely understood or well used. But they are the opportunities of the future.

Identity means who you are. While in reality there is only one of each of us, in practice we all present many different faces to the world. In some cases, this is a matter of persona - we act one way at the office and another way at the family barbeque, yet we remain the same person. Conversely, we maintain multiple identities as a means to, for example, insulate ourselves from different experiences on the Internet. John Yoakum, at Nortel, has given this a lot of thought and has insights into how one exposes, protects and manages these distinctions. He notes that identity is something you own and you assert to gain trust and foster interaction, and not something to be managed for you by others. The level of trust necessary for each situation varies significantly. The overriding objective is to establish just the right level of trust while preserving privacy and avoiding identity theft exposure.

Context is likewise a small word that covers a lot of territory. Some of it is based on pure fact - geographical coordinates are just numbers but where you are is a construct predicated on inference, assumptions and the intersection of more than one database. A particular latitude, longitude and altitude co-ordinate doesn’t reveal whether you are indoors or at the movies. Hal Abelson just ran a class at MIT on programming open phones that sparkled with the exuberance of youth. One student made his phone vibrate in the theater and ring loudly elsewhere (i.e., the phone changed the volume because it was aware of its location). Another student buzzed a reminder to get milk as he passed a food store.

Ultimately, we will make real-world mashups that tell you when to head for a market checkout line so you can catch the bus that is now three blocks away and will get you to the train station on time (something I talked about in my last guest entry). 

But wait, there's more. Suppose we assume that even identity is a mashup, something that is computed on the fly as the product of a negotiation. Why flood the world with "dumb keys" and "smart locks?"  What happens when they become equals?  Here's a couple of examples …

Last year, I took my daughter out to dinner and we got "carded" while ordering wine. This may be a distinctly American problem, since we worry so much about alcohol, yet it makes no sense. "Carding" means asking for ID to prove you are of legal drinking age (i.e., 21).  Fifty years ago, age was just about the only thing that was known about you, and it was reliably printed on your driver's license. We used it as a proxy for being responsible enough to drink, or to vote, or to see an adult movie. We can do better now. For voting, there are already communities that use a different age for local elections than they do for national ones. Clearly there is a difference between having wine in town with the family and rolling out of a jeep with six drunken friends after a college football game. In fact, perhaps my daughter's rights could be authorized by me, even though I might be 600 miles away. Distance is no longer a problem; if we can validate a toll pass at 30 kilometers per hour, I could certainly grant her real-time permissions as needed.

At the MIT Media Lab, we built a prototype ID that negotiated with a door to decide whether you should be allowed in - a smarter key. When you approached the door, it asked you via your cell phone who you were, and you could respond with either a name or a reason. You might be a student, or you might have a temporary authorization to enter as a surrogate for me, or your validation could be that you are attending a meeting, in which case, the door could tell you where the conference room is. The point is that we replaced a unitary response with a negotiation. Instead of telling everything to every door that asks, your phone asked the door what it really needed to know.

Where does it go from here, and how do we get there? 

My guess is that we need to think "horizontally" and build open protocols versus continuing to think in vertical silos that are each a fully packaged application. This trend is well under way but it might benefit from a little formalization. Think of it as a general parts catalogue for the creation of services and negotiations. There are inroads being made in web mashups, social networks, and in sensing both the environment and the activities of people within it. These are a good start but are largely ad hoc.

A second trend is that the network to which we connect is opening up more and becoming less the focus of a service. As Chris Hobbs, of Nortel, has noted, increasingly we will subscribe to services directly rather than the network that delivers them. The Amazon Kindle and the SPOT emergency locator are the poster children for this enlightened view.

This is Hyperconnectivity in action - it heralds an era where we move past products and into architectures. Instead of customers, we will have partners who design the products with us and with our tools. To get there, we need research, reliability, and ways to scale on demand.  This is as true for an insurance company as it is for a communications enabler, and Nortel recognizes that, both in the ways that it deals with its partners and customers, and in the structure of the company itself.  That's what makes for innovation.

In the past several months, I have been involved in a number of discussions around the world, where governments are trying to push for “next-generation” broadband as a government-sponsored initiative. The reason for this is that in the last decade many countries have used broadband roll-out as a way to stimulate economic development and GDP growth. In fact, many studies and reports (including the data in the graphs below) show clearly that where Internet and data services have been deployed, the GDP has expanded at a significant rate.

Source: Michael Minges, TMG Telecom, and ITU World Telecommunications Database Statistics, 2003.

It is also clear that many countries have claimed bragging rights on broadband penetration and adoption. Northern Ireland, for example, talks often about its target of becoming one of the first countries to have 100% broadband access penetration with ½ a megabit of capacity per user. Korea and many of the Nordic countries also talk about significant milestones in broadband penetration and capacity. And Singapore speaks of its fiber deployments and broadband penetration as a competitive advantage. The list goes on.

The question now is: “Given that there is significant broadband penetration, what is the next step to further capitalize on technology for GDP growth, attracting business and differentiating one country or region from the others? In other words, “What is the definition of “Next-Generation Broadband”?

First, I will tell you what – in my opinion – it is not. It is not simply about scaling up the capacity of existing systems purely from a bandwidth-per-user level. The reason I do not view this as true next generation is that if we look at any broadband system, inevitably we have seen incremental technology improvements that boost the speeds in the technology. DSL, for example, started at a few hundred kilobits per second and then evolved to the point where today we can deliver megabits or even tens of megabits of capacity per copper line. I doubt anyone would consider the DSL evolution as a true next generation of broadband; it is simple an improved model of the current broadband paradigm. Similarly, DOCSIS 3.0 by itself is not next-generation broadband; it is simply the same paradigm at a higher capacity. My intent is certainly not to belittle these advances – without a doubt they are significant in terms of both technical merit and customer impact – but when a country states that it is going to launch a “next-generation broadband effort” in my view it has be transformational not simply incremental.

So, how should “next-generation broadband” be defined? I am sure there are many transformational aspects of broadband and that a uniform view of “next generation” is probably not easy or even possible to agree upon. For the purposes of starting a dialog, though, let me throw out two significant changes that if applied to broadband systems and services might meet this threshold. 

1. A wavelength to every person or business. In this paradigm shift, the value of the optical network is applied to access. In such a service, rather than users sharing a packet network for broadband access, the principles of wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) could be applied to access, and each user or business would be given a wavelength (or lambda). Because dense WDM (DWDM) systems can scale to huge capacities (up to 40 or 100 gigabits per second per lambda in core systems), the result would be a revolutionary change in capacity. Additionally, because optical is a physical layer network, the types of traffic over the system could be extremely flexible. It could be IP- or Ethernet-based but it could also evolve to include any communications technology that can run over optical networks. Additionally, the characteristics of optical networks are such that symmetrical capacity can be delivered. Today, most broadband is asymmetrical, in that downstream capacity is usually far greater than upstream capacity. That works fine in older Internet models, where consumers predominantly consume content, but in Web 2.0 and 3.0 we will see far more user-created content being sent into the network and that will require symmetrical bandwidth systems. Today, there are some early technologies being tested and deployed that provide this type of broadband experience. The most prominent is WDM-PON (Wavelength Division Multiplexing - Passive Optical Networking) but other models may be possible assuming they deliver flexible, ultra-high capacity, symmetric broadband services.
2. Multi-network mobile broadband. Today, there are many broadband offerings to the populations of countries but most of them are focused on delivering a single network to homes and businesses. These are usually known as “fixed broadband” systems, such as cable and DSL. Additionally, there are some emerging wireless broadband systems, such as WiMAX and eventually LTE. These wireless systems provide broadband over the air. Sometimes it is to a home, much like fixed broadband, but in some cases it is to a mobile device such as a phone. One could certainly consider mobile broadband as “next generation” and I would be inclined to agree, but the real revolution will occur when we recognize that the future is not about a single network providing all Internet services but rather about a set of networks working together to deliver a complete communications experience.That’s why I believe that the other true “next generation” broadband system will be one where fixed and mobile networks begin to act in concert to create a seamless user experience. Some early models of this are known as Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC). These technologies make possible things like the handoff of phone calls between an enterprise PBX and a mobile device, but they could be expanded to include making a single identity and subscriber set transferable across any network access. Imagine if you could interact with a network that understood who you are, where you are located and within what environmental context (e.g., in close proximity to something or someone; available or not available to accept calls, etc.), and then used one of many possible network connections to deliver communications to you. Take that forward and imagine that you could use your mobile phone to control your television or a video conference without forcing the devices to exist on the same type of network. This model recognizes that a plurality of networks will operate in a coordinated fashion to deliver complex and immersive – yet transparent – communications, entertainment and business functions. As we consider “next-generation broadband” maybe it is less about a single physical network and more about a multi-network experience. If that is the case, then governments must consider that their role may be to facilitate interaction rather than to partition the industry into segments based on connection type. In this model, broadband suddenly becomes bigger than transport, and policy related to it must now include a much broader set of industries.

There are undoubtedly other definitions of next-generation broadband, but for the purposes of starting a dialog I put forward the two options above. The only aspect of this dialog that is critical in my mind, though, is that if we are to really call something “next generation” it seems that we should have greater aspirations of change than simply increasing the capacity of an existing system.  

I welcome your thoughts on this

Location: Toronto

After a crazy few weeks of travel, including attending a trade conference in Northern Ireland, meeting UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Northern Ireland First Minister Ian Paisley, and Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland Martin McGuinness – and a host of other activities – I am finally back in Canada for a few days.

Today Nortel held a media event in Toronto to discuss a project we initiated a few months ago with industry analyst firm IDC. In essence, we asked IDC to validate our thinking around if and how the hyperconnected world is emerging. The key take-away is that we were in fact correct in asserting that not only are people becoming more connected, but that a new identity of information and communications user has emerged that far exceeds the usage level and complexity of prior generations. That new user is more connected than ever before, and expectations are clearly shifting from “anywhere, anytime” to “everywhere, all the time” communications. Some key conclusions from the study:

• 16 percent of business users are already hyperconnected: The hyperconnected have a much higher adoption of communication devices and applications than those in other clusters. They are reasonably happy with their work/life balance, even though they use almost all devices and applications for both, and they are willing to communicate with work on vacation, in restaurants, from bed, and even in their place of worship.
• Asia Pacific is leading the way in Hyperconnectivity: The largest percentage of “hyperconnected” are in Asia Pacific. And, while hyperconnected business users can be found in all countries, they are higher than average in the U.S. and China, and lowest in Canada and the United Arab Emirates.
• 40 percent of business users will be hyperconnected within a few years: With an aging workforce retiring, younger employees entering the workforce, and a current majority of increasingly connected users, 40 percent of business users may be hyperconnected within a few years.
• Enterprises will compete for talent: As baby boomers retire, corporations will find themselves increasingly competing for talent. Hyperconnected individuals expect to work in a rich communications environment and consider the newer communications solutions a condition of their employment. They don’t want just anywhere, anytime communications – they demand it “everywhere, all the time.”
• Latin America has largest percentage of hyperconnected/increasingly connected users: 64 percent of business users in Latin America rank as hyperconnected/increasingly connected, compared to 59 percent in Asia Pacific, 50 percent in Europe, and 44 percent in North America.
• Phones are more important than wallets and keys: When asked which item people would take if they had to leave the house for 24 hours – and if they could only take one thing with them – more than 38 percent of global respondents chose their mobile phone over their wallet, keys, laptop, and MP3 player. Less than 30 percent chose their wallet first. In Latin America, more than 50 percent chose their mobile phone over any other item. The hyperconnected preferred taking their laptops.
• Social network adoption is growing in the Enterprise: More than one in three business users use social networks and online communities such as blogs, wikis, and online forums for business communication – with workers in the Caribbean and Latin America leading the world. Personal postings to social networks and online communities are nearly three times as common as business postings.
• Enterprises are struggling with disparate communications: Nearly one in five respondents found it hard to manage multiple disparate sources of communication. Users in the finance and high-tech segments are the most dissatisfied with the way their companies manage multiple communications sources. More than 25 percent said their corporate communications systems are slow and unreliable.
• Different industries, different stories: Hyperconnectivity varies by industry, from 9 percent of respondents in health care ranking as hyperconnected compared to 25 percent in high tech and 21 percent in finance industries.
• Multiple devices are the global norm: 70 percent of respondents connect to the Internet at home with more than one device. In Asia Pacific, that number jumps to 80 percent. Nearly 80 percent of 18 to 34 year olds connect to the Internet at home using more than one device.

What all of this means for our customers and Nortel is that the importance of a Unified Communications strategy and technology will only increase. If the vanguard of users in the hyperconnected world represents 16% of the existing population (and a full 40% are not far behind) then it is critical that CIOs begin to develop core strategies to embrace this connectedness. The means and modes of communications will increase exponentially over the next decade, and that explosion will put huge stress on the networks in place. Inside the enterprise, the challenge will be less about capacity issues and more about a diverse set of communications interfaces and experiences – and the growing expectation of users that all will be coordinated. It will not be acceptable to have diverse address books, presence information, or even identity. It will also be critical that a wide range of collaboration experiences be available broadly, from video to voice to IM to immersive environments. Additionally, the CIO will be unable to tightly link these attributes to a set of well-defined applications but must think about embedding a set of communications functions into whatever application the business user or customer needs to use.

The strategy at Nortel has been to enable that communications integration in a way that the entire applications ecosystem can be empowered with embedded communications services. Imagine that any application that stores information or creates it can seamlessly interact with collaboration and communications tools and services and can do so in a unified way. While we have espoused this belief for some time, the just released study from IDC (http://www.nortel.com/idcstudy) – entitled “The Hyperconnected: Here They Come!” – has validated that a growing and significant portion of the end user base (on a global level) has exactly that same expectation.

It is good to see statistical data that shows we are heading toward the market demand we have anticipated and, as many of you know, the last year has seen double-digit gains of market share from Nortel in the Enterprise market primarily linked to our leadership in Unified Communications. Since the transformed enterprise is a key element of our company strategy, this study and the trends it captures are a good indication that we placed a wise bet on this evolution of the voice market and stand to have both access and opportunity in the market. Take a few minutes to review the study and ask yourself if you see the hyperconnected emerging around you (or even, if you are one of them) and more importantly ask yourself if the majority of the population becomes like those profiled, what will that do to our thinking on how people use communications and networking technology going forward?

I’d be interested in hearing what you have to say, both related to this blog entry and the study itself.

Location: Flying to Vancouver

First, let me apologize for being absent from blogging for a bit. I’ve had an unusually busy and complex several weeks. Hopefully, you all found the guest blog from Andy Lippman interesting and had a chance to see some of the recent dialog I have had with other bloggers, such as Om Malik (GigaOM). One of the challenges of blogging when you have a few other full-time jobs is finding quality time to write and, ironically, when you’re not able to write it’s amazing just how much interesting content and dialog emerges, creating a pretty significant backlog of topics. I hope to tackle many of those topics in the coming weeks.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been in three cities in California, as well as in Boston, Ottawa, and London. I have met with some of our strategic partners (both go-to-market and technology), regulators, investors, media and customers key to our business. One interesting topic that surfaced in many of those dialogs was around whether the use of wireless technology in the enterprise would transform the enterprise networking structure.

As you may recall, last July we announced an initiative called “the unwired enterprise,” where we predicted that by roughly 2010 enterprises would be able to use wireless technology as their primary access network. We said we believed that the combination of innovation beyond 802.11n WiFi, together with the emergence of such 4G wireless technologies as LTE and Mobile WiMAX, would create a model where abundant and functional local and broadband mobile capacity would be real. This would mean the end of the over-wiring of campus LANs, a change in the value chain, and - most importantly - an expectation that our applications and business tools would be built for the mobile world first and primarily (versus today, where they are designed for wired campus LANs and then adapted for wireless).

The interesting thread in the various dialogs, though, was the discussion around “if broadband wireless and 4G emerge, why would anyone need a campus LAN at all? Why not simply move every application and device to the cellular carrier 4G network and eliminate the enterprise network entirely?”

Now before you react too quickly, a pretty strong case exists to make this move. First, if we look forward to LTE and Mobile WiMAX, we can see multi-megabit per second capacity with very low latency and the added bonus of large-scale broadband mobility. Additionally, 4G networks have a very enterprise-centric operating model, where security is designed to decouple the end system from the infrastructure (providing the flexibility required in order to connect your own devices to the network). A 4G network will also have the characteristic of being a “pipe in the sky,” meaning that it is a packet-based IP transport without strict design for any specific applications (just like a corporate LAN or the Internet). All in all, 4G networks will look much more like large-scale WiFi networks or even corporate Ethernet LANs than they will resemble a cellular network of the present or past. That’s pretty appealing and, given the innovation going on in mobile devices (e.g., smart phones and ultra mobile PCs), it seems like this could be a reasonable model for the enterprise.

As good as that sounds, however, the case can also be made that there will still be a solid need for the enterprise to own and operate its own internal network. The reasons for this position are just as compelling.

First is the issue of trust and control. If you own your own network then you are, as they say, master of your own destiny. Given the import of connectedness for business systems, giving up this critical control is unlikely for most CIOs and enterprises. While carrier networks and cellular systems are today a big part of the overall enterprise architecture, they are used in very specific and measured models, usually accompanied by strict service level agreements and the associated costs of such guarantees.

Second, while the 4G world is pretty fast for a cellular system, the capacity innovation inside the enterprise is amazingly rapid. With 802.11n, we are seeing in excess of 300 megs per channel and with some new innovation upwards of 15 or 20 channels per area, for a total of 6 gigs of capacity. Realistically, a system with multiple gigabits of capacity shared among a small number of users anywhere in a campus is possible. This is close to the kind of capacity the wireline gigabit world is offering today and a few orders of magnitude faster than even 4G. Given that capacity mismatch, the allure is there for enterprises to continue to offer local high-capacity networks, be they wired or wireless.

Third, is the issue of intelligence. In most enterprise networks, transport is not just a pipe but a system that allows the CIO to build applications that utilize network intelligence to provide secure and directed services. Consider role-based access control, where a CIO can use the internal network to provide secure access to the company’s employees while also using the same network (in a different policy) to grant visitor or guest access. That kind of flexible security control is easy to do on an internal LAN but would be much more complex in a network provided by a large-scale operator or carrier (where one network would need to support all the roles of all the enterprises sharing it, not just one enterprise’s policy set). In addition to roles and security, the corporate LAN is also increasingly being used to provide location information, to qualify presence and availability to unified communications systems, and to trigger appropriate multimedia interaction that is based on the context of the user and his/her environment (depending on location, state and mobility, for example). This kind of flexible context-based service is a key to the intelligent enterprise experience and would not be easily replicated in a public network system.

Finally, there is the cost issue. Speaking as a former CIO, one thing CIOs like are services and technology that are free once you own the system. Internal voice and data networks fall into that model; cellular and wide area systems do not. The idea of having a networking option that allows for applications and communications to operate at zero cost in even some of the footprint of the enterprise is hard to give up.

So, the question is: “Will innovation in cellular mobile networks render the enterprise LAN unnecessary?” My opinion is “no.” Although we will clearly see dramatically expanded use of 4G networks to support the enterprise, we will simultaneously see a shift in the enterprise to a more mobile WiFi network working with that 4G ecosystem. This combination of both public and private high-capacity, mobile, intelligent wireless access networks is the essence of the unwired enterprise.

This shift to the unwired enterprise will happen over the next several years and with it will be a transformation of the application models used in the enterprise (a shift towards mobility-based applications as the default). It will also mean that the preferred end system will be inherently more mobility centric (laptops, UMPCs, smart phones and, most significantly, multi-network roaming between the 4G and WiFi campus). And, finally, as this new reality emerges the intelligent interaction between infrastructure and applications will create more targeted and intuitive collaboration experiences.

As with any prediction, time will tell. We’ll have to wait and see what actually happens and how everything plays out. The punch line though is that the evolution of the unwired world will change much of what we understand about networks and the new result will be an unprecedented level of interaction between public and private networks and a value that is much higher than ever before.

I welcome your thoughts on this topic.

I’m pleased today to host a guest blog from well-known industry thought leader Dr. Andrew Lippman. Andy, one of the founding directors of the MIT Media Lab, is half-way through a year-long sabbatical with Nortel as our first (but certainly not last) Visiting Fellow. The possibility of Andy doing his sabbatical at Nortel was explored by both sides during our Technical Conference last year, during which MIT hosted 300 of our top engineers for an evening event. A professor of Andy’s stature taking a sabbatical to work for a corporation is quite unique and says a great deal about Andy’s opinions of Nortel and our vision.

Among our key objectives in bringing a visionary like Andy into Nortel was for him to bring an outside perspective into the company and to challenge our technology community, on an on-going basis, to think differently. He's making a strong contribution and we’re delighted to have him with us.

Andy Lippman

Some ten years ago I saw my first mashup. At the time, we at the MIT Media Lab, sponsored by Nortel, were also working with Federal Express, and they had just put package tracking on the web. At the same time, they were tracking the users who tracked them. One day they noticed that they were getting a lot of hits from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Now, why would the good citizens of Grand Rapids want to track so many packages - what was generating the traffic?

It turns out that Steelcase is in Grand Rapids, but that alone didn’t explain it. Steelcase doesn’t typically ship office furniture by Fedex. But what they do send overnight are all the keys that people have lost to those filing cabinets and that absolutely, positively have to be delivered the next day. Steelcase had written a program to scrape the Fedex site, grab the delivery information, and insert it into its own web site to support its customers, who wanted the ability to track the information directly on the Steelcase site. Now, of course, mashups are the order of the day, and a future where much of what is on the network is a malleable resource rather than a top-to-bottom service is pretty obvious. But, in the 90's it was a dream.

Where will it go from here, and when? Here are two quick thoughts that might spur some further thinking. These thoughts arise from interactions with the people at Nortel combined with a history at MIT. Both are more hip than you might think.

First, it seems clear to most everyone that in very short order the wireless devices we carry will opportunistically tune into any resource that is available to do whatever business needs to be done. The notion of a single "account" tied to the device is about as tired as the black rotary dial phone. Some of these resources will originate with carriers who transport data over great distances on your behalf, but many will bypass them. Carriers will provide some of these valuable services but, as a minimum, they will provide high-capacity pure pipes.

Much of the traffic will be local and will not use a large area network at all. It will be based on context and place - terms with meanings far deeper than the simple words imply. One of my students at MIT, Nadav Aharony, is building protocols for social, proximate networking that allows you to pass messages and tasks between friends as you run into them. Membership is not solely based on who you are, but on what groups and activities you are engaged in. Nadav (with others) has built a demonstration called "snap and share" that automatically migrates a group photo to the cameras of everyone who is in the picture and their families. We have all been in such shots before, where we nominate one person or a passerby to take our picture, and they have to do it with at least five different cameras so that each owner has his or her shot of the whole gang. With snap and share, one picture will do. In fact, we might as well all stand in front of a camera that is already poised in the environment, and just grab the image from it. Nadav's network also would let you know if one of your online dating possibilities is in the bar that you just entered, or pass along literature to your cohorts at a convention. His point is that you yourself are a wandering suite of services and data that you want to distribute among individuals and groups that you know, without prior arrangement, potentially without your intervention, and often without uploading and downloading it. He is exploring the informational value of just bumping into people. In Nadav's lexicon, you are a carrier.

Other resources in the environment are just as interesting. We ought to be able to tap into supercomputers in the walls that do things for us that are a bit too complicated or power-hungry to do on a handheld device. Translating a phone call from one language to another, for example, will take a while to be efficient on a portable device, but it is easier for a machine that has a better sense of context; think of the subtitles in a movie - they are better done when you know what the movie is about. Likewise, you can't easily hold up your phone and pick out the violin in an orchestra much less identify Josh Bell as the player, or aim your camera at a group and count the people it sees, much less whether your wife is in the shot. These are things that can be done with help from other computers and other mikes and cameras. We ought to be able to mashup reality and have our portable tell us that if we head for checkout counter number three from where we are, we can make our purchases and get to the bus stop in time to catch the bus that is three blocks away and will get us to the train station on time.

My second thought is that this future is arriving far faster than any of us thought even as recently as a few years ago. It used to be that we worried about disruptive technologies. Fifteen years ago, a hallmark of the Media Lab's style was that we built highly cost-ineffective technologies just to see what they could do. We figured they would eventually be affordable. We showed the distant future. Now, everyone anticipates and expects change. The disruptor is the speed of change, not the fact of it. Consider how quickly YouTube revised television and news, things we had researched for twenty-five years. Or recall what Napster did to the recording industry overnight. In other words, disruption is not the disruptor, its rapidity is.

My explanation is that the "clockspeed" of society depends on the age at which we are introduced to the dominant technology of the time. When that was the automobile, society churned on a 16-year cycle -- that's the age when you got your driver's license. Intelligent communications dominates today, and we are introduced to that at age three. You know this if you have two children who went through high school three years apart. One was pre-Facebook and the other was post. Their experience is so vastly different that they can barely talk to each other. In other words, society adapts and evolves far faster today than it did in the past (and it is being driven by the kids...)

From what I've seen so far, Nortel seems to have gotten the message. They are not just listening to kids, they are hiring them -- close to 500 new engineers in the last 15 months alone. Inside the company, they call them "new-grads," and they are simultaneously trained and sincerely listened to. Some of them are experimenting with techniques that take reality, spatiality, and personal context, and mash them into services and communications that are defined on-the-fly, are personalized and automatic. John wrote about the tip of that iceberg when he described a virtual "Global Information Session" a couple of weeks ago. What he didn't tell you was the real action occurred after the presentations, when about 100 of us remained in the space. We bumped into each other and had private and group side conversations. In less than an hour, we had become at home in a world that didn't exist and caught up with buddies that were time zones away. How long before whole companies become mashups like this?

IT and communications are becoming one discipline, each learning from the other. What was once an IT function is now a product definition, and there are no more plain vanilla users. Today's workers live by mashups, invent solutions on-the-fly and don't wear the strait jackets that once were the order of the day. Tomorrow's workers won't distinguish between corporate life and social actions. Their VPN is everyone they know. And tomorrow is just 12 hours away. Watch this space to see how we will make this future happen.

Location: Ottawa, Canada

One of the most significant challenges of being in the public eye and communicating to the press is the fact that headlines often fail to capture the true essence of the details, and often even the details are taken out of a broader context. That reality can certainly create significant confusion when complex topics are discussed. As a good example of this, yesterday I gave a talk at a Technology Executive Breakfast in Ottawa to discuss the progress we’ve been making against the transformation of R&D at Nortel. In this blog post, I would like to share some of that content. As you digest the details, though, I ask you to consider the headline “Nortel to rethink R&D work plans, executive says” and ask if it is an accurate reflection of the overall message.

Well over a year ago now, we began a significant R&D transformation effort within Nortel, where we began to look at R&D from a “total Nortel” perspective (versus from the perspectives of individual R&D groups within each of our lines of business). There were multiple reasons why we began this transformation. Among them … the fact that we were spending over 50% of our R&D budget on late-lifecycle products; our R&D spend as a percentage of revenue was much too high; we had very little re-use of technology going on across the businesses; we lacked common processes; and the employee satisfaction scores of our R&D teams were getting worse. Most of this was the natural result of the collapse of the telecom bubble and the dramatic changes in Nortel as a result. What became increasingly clear, though, is that if we did not stabilize and strengthen our R&D organization, then we could not reasonably expect to execute on our business strategy to lead in the era of hyperconnectivity.

In order to transform an R&D function that is both large (about 12,000 people) and distributed (many business units and all geographies), the effort needed to be comprehensive and positioned for the long term. Given that, we embarked on our path. This path included three major pillars. First, we needed to make sure we had a balanced, responsible, and stable R&D operating model; second, we needed to create a framework for world-class operations and process excellence; and third, we needed to recognize, cultivate, and celebrate our world-class people talent. Let me talk about each of these areas in a bit of detail.

Creating a balanced, responsible, and stable R&D operating model

To reach a viable long-term R&D operating model, we needed to do many complex and difficult tasks. First, we needed to get the total R&D spend to the 14-15% of revenue range -- more in line with the industry norm and our target operating model. This involved significant changes in R&D over the past 2 years and, unfortunately, did involve both people reductions and the shift of our global footprint. This is old news and is almost completed based on our decisive actions over the past 18 months. Today, we are operating inside of that target window.

Additionally, we needed to shift resources to new and emerging technologies. We did this through a strategy called “20-60-20”. Rather than spending more than 50% of our R&D budget on late-lifecycle products, we committed to moving resources so that only 20% would be late-lifecycle spend, 60% would be focused on growth and mature product activity, and a full 20% would be directed to emerging and new technologies and markets. Given the fact that we spend more than $1.7 billion a year on R&D, moving to this new alignment clearly meant some significant shifts of workforce to both new formations and new projects and skills. Again, this is old news, as we have already announced and executed on this and today, after less than 18 months, are operating at almost exactly 20-60-20.

As part of this first pillar, we also created an incubation fund, in order to open new addressable markets outside of the existing business units. Today, 3% of R&D is now devoted to “startups” within Nortel.

And, finally, last year we began to look at our R&D footprint in terms of developing a skills-based R&D site strategy. Today, we have a consolidated global, cross-business view of where we have critical masses of expertise. This skills-based site strategy is a more strategic way of doing R&D. It will make it easier to move resources to new jobs and opportunities within sites/skills cluster, and will create less disruption from an operational perspective (e.g., if we ramp down one project at a site, it will be much easier to redeploy those resources to another project that is ramping).

Creating world-class processes and operational excellence

The second pillar of R&D transformation at Nortel has been a focus on creating exceptional operations and processes. Here again, the transformation is complex but mostly complete. We first looked at structure, and in early 2006 we launched an effort to create a common engineering group. This group, consisting of thousands of R&D personnel, was created to provide a common foundation that could be leveraged by the business unit R&D teams. Under this group, we centralized platform work, common components, common management, silicon development, tools and R&D processes that could be leveraged across a range of product teams. This “build once, use many” approach goes directly to creating efficient re-use in the company and allows us to avoid hundreds of millions of duplicate spend in each area. Today, for example, almost all of our Carrier solutions leverage common platforms (work that was begun by Richard Lowe, our president of Carrier Networks and a strong proponent of this model) and as such are being delivered faster and at lower cost and greater scalability than before.

We also recently created a centralized R&D operations role under the leadership of Tony Pirih, who reports to me and oversees R&D operations – on a consolidated basis – across the company (with all other R&D leaders reporting into him on a dotted line). This consolidated management chain allows R&D to collectively act as one (one of the Nortel core principles that Mike Z articulates), to make rapid decisions and to develop cross-business unit processes to, again, drive efficiency and scale.

We have also made the decision to adopt the CMMI process and operations approach to institutionalize continuous improvement in R&D. CMMI is generally seen as the gold standard for process, and the results of a disciplined process and operational structure are well understood. We have now completed much of our baseline, have begun the efforts, and are starting to see the results. CMMI is a long-term commitment to process efficiency and quality, and unlike other initiatives in this list, is much more evolutionary than revolutionary.

Finally, we have added (or, in some cases, re-established) a set of new (and missing) functions to the company. For example, we have reconstituted a core industrial design group (Nortel historically was well-respected as a leader in this space with its Design Interpretive group, which was eliminated during the bubble burst) and have created centralized Design to Value and Design Cost Reduction groups to drive cost reductions and margin improvement.

A Renewed Focus on Our People

The third, and in my opinion the most important area of R&D transformation, has been a renewed focus on our people. You can measure your people in many ways, but to me the two that matter most are their skills and their satisfaction. On the R&D skills side, Nortel is rich in talent. In fact, one of the main reasons I joined Nortel was because of the technical strength of the R&D teams. On the satisfaction side, two years ago Nortel was suffering from a continued decline in R&D ESAT. Much could be attributed to the state of the industry and the negative events of the past 5 years, but the additional factor was that a true focus on cultivating talent in R&D had been minimized for quite some time.

In order to address this area we again launched a series of initiatives to transform the people side of Nortel. In the last year, for example, we have launched a new “Nortel Fellows” program, which recognizes our best technical experts. We also held our first annual technical conference last summer, bringing together 300 of our top technical people to collaborate and invent the future. And, last fall, we held a number of formal recognition events for our patent creators. This IPR recognition was driven by Mike Z’s understanding of the importance of IPR to Nortel’s future and his passion about recognizing and thanking our technical teams for the extra time and effort they take to invent and capture those inventions - essential to a healthy R&D environment. This year, we have launched a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff recognition program (the level below a Fellow) and are revamping our technical ladder (career path) to ensure that top technical talent cannot only work at Nortel but can progress their career here. Finally, we have dramatically accelerated our new graduate hiring with about 1000 new grads entering Nortel last year.

The result of many of these people efforts (as well as the other initiatives I mentioned above – such as directing more of our R&D dollars to the front end) is starting to pay dividends. For the first time in quite some time, we are seeing a statistically significant rise in R&D ESAT and we continue to be able to attract world-class talent globally.

The amount of work and the complexity involved in R&D transformation is obviously significant. What may not be obvious is that this has been going on for some time and by any reasonable measure has resulted in a huge positive change in our R&D posture. And this is what you would and should expect from us, whether you’re a customer, partner, employee and/or a shareholder. Our ability to operate R&D more effectively and at lower cost, to contribute to the improved operating margin of the company, and to create a stronger technical position for the company should resonate with all. We are not done with this process but the approach is structured and we believe world-class.

As a final note, let me go back to the headline comment at the start of the blog... “Nortel to rethink R&D work plans, executive says”. This would have been a great headline in the summer of 2006. Today, it is a bit out of context and while the observation that we clearly did re-think R&D a few years ago is true, we are now well into executing on that comprehensive R&D transformation and are indeed making solid, measurable, progress.

Location: Ottawa, Canada

Thanks to all for the comments and dialogue on the previous posts. Today, I'll get back to discussing technology, which is the real purpose of this blog.

One of the goals that drives me and certainly one of the big challenges and opportunities for the industry is to figure out how we can achieve a better-than-reality communications experience through the use of technology.

I wanted to share with you an event that happened at Nortel this week that represents a step on that journey.

Yesterday, I held a global employee session within a virtual mixed-reality world, using a prototype platform we’re investigating as part of an incubation effort. We had 150+ people participating in the virtual environment, hundreds of others participating by congregating in real-world auditoriums or large meeting rooms (where they could see and hear on large screens what was happening in the virtual world, through the “eyes” and “ears” of one of the Avatars), and others participating from their desktops using more traditional web conferencing tools.

The experience was fantastic. I was able to present, dialogue with employees, and answer questions within the virtual world but also in a way that all of the employees using other more traditional mediums – audio and voice conferencing and sitting in auditoriums – could also be a part of.

What was different about this, versus doing a large company meeting in an environment like Second Life, is that a host of different technologies could be part of an integrated experience within Nortel’s own enterprise application architecture. Everything was linked to our telecom infrastructure, corporate security and identity management systems. In other virtual reality experiences, like Second Life or multi-player on-line gaming systems, you need to go into their footprint and are limited by their capabilities. For example, although a name may be attached to an Avatar, you have no way of really knowing who that individual is in the real world. Yesterday, the virtual experience (complete with high-quality spatial audio) became part of our own IT ecosystem.

There were a few minor glitches along the way – to be expected with any prototype – but it was successful and allowed us to accomplish the task of a quarterly update to a globally distributed work force. The reality of it also sparked a huge number of new potential applications and uses. In the model of learning by doing, this kind of real immersion into new systems is a critical path to future innovation.

Our goal is to create a better-than-reality communications experience through technology. Today that’s just not possible. During conference calls, unless you know the speaker’s voice, you can’t identify who is speaking. Although telepresence is a dramatic improvement to the teleconference, facilities are costly, not widely available, you have to be in a particular place at a particular time, and there are issues with scale.

Although today’s broadband networks are giving us the ability to put communications wherever we want to, if we simply put legacy communications paradigms into these mobile and extended environments, we won’t really solve the problems. What we need to do is to create something that allows an experience that is at least equivalent to – if not superior to – a real world experience anywhere the broadband network exists. So, step 1 is to build a broadband network. Step 2 is to improve the experience by including all of those attributes that make the human-to-human experience exciting and effective.

That’s why much of our research and next-generation investment is focused on this area – identifying what makes the real-world experience special and effective and then replicating those capabilities through technology.

In that respect, I’d love your input. What is it about the real-world face-to-face experience that makes it a superior one over any technological experience that exists today? Is it visual? Emotive? Spatial? Dynamic? Simple? Transparent? Etc. And what are the technologies that you think could help replicate that experience?