John Roese’s Blog CTO, Nortel

One of the key drivers behind Nortel's Unified Communications strategy is the realization that success in the applications business of the future will not be based on who can build the best single application, but rather who can present the most comprehensive and useful experience to the user.

In the past, the success of an application has been measured based on its ability to address a very specific function (ERP, e-mail, CRM, ...). In the future, the very definition of an application will change – as will its measure of success – to instead be a composite entity that embraces all of the relevant information and tools needed to have a complete and unified collaboration experience.

Early examples of this shift are already being seen in web portals, where you pick the tiles of functions (stocks, e-mail, news, ...) or in smart phones (Palm, Microsoft Mobile, Blackberry ...), where in one interface or device a range of tools are used to communicate, entertain and interact.

What becomes clear as we look at applications in this light, is that the goal in the future must be to create complete "experiences" and, in almost every case, the benefit of having communications capabilities as part of that experience is obvious.

To that end, Nortel has spent the last few years developing the tools, interfaces and capabilities that make it possible for communications functions to be added to applications in order to create new and rich experiences. In this post, I wanted to highlight a few examples of where the applications and communications worlds are coming together to create what we call communications-enabled applications.

"Communications-enabled" healthcare solutions ... One of the first instantiations of Nortel communications-enabled applications was targeted at the healthcare vertical. Several years ago, one of our research teams interacted with various customers in healthcare delivery and realized that the ability to track people and devices, communicate with them, and coordinate their activities was very difficult in the fluid environment of a hospital or other healthcare setting. The conclusion they reached was that if it became dramatically easier to connect the right medical skills at the right time to the right situation, lives could possibly be saved. Minutes or seconds of delay can literally mean the difference between life and death. With that in mind, the team developed a prototype that combined location tracking, skills-based routing, dynamic multimedia conferencing and the capability to automatically coordinate teams based on context – with the end result of dramatically improving the collaborative response to an emergency situation. Below is a set of images from that solution that captures the experience.

Essentially, this prototype made it possible for the system – which was enabled by Nortel signaling technology, interfaces into the network to provide location and communications context, and conferencing and collaborative technology – to track the medical staff by skill and specialty so that when an event such as a cardiac situation occurred, the system would dynamically find, link and connect the people/teams best positioned to respond. This solution, first prototyped years ago and shown at a few HIMSS conferences is now part of Nortel's healthcare solutions offerings.

First Responder solution ... A second example of a communications-enabled application in the enterprise, is a prototype we've developed for automating first response to emergencies. In this solution, again, we have combined location, conferencing, call management, skills-based routing and a host of other communications and networking capabilities into a coordinated system that, when an event occurs, makes possible a rapid and effective response.

What's also interesting about this solution is that the notification of the event can be triggered by sensor networks that monitor buildings (like manufacturing plants), temperature or even fire detection systems. Linking human response to the machine-to-machine intelligence found in the systems that run our businesses creates a model where everything from people to devices can be coordinated to deal with anomalous events.

The screen capture below shows some of the interfaces. One particularly interesting aspect is the ability to link location displays to not just the Intranet capabilities of an enterprise but also to monitor the location of such things as fire trucks and ambulances outside of the physical enterprise (the Google maps interface shown in the lower right is tracking a fire engine heading to the event). You can find a short video of what this unified communications experience would look like here.

Beyond these enterprise examples, there are countless other possibilities. In the image below, for example, are some of the many communications-enabled experiences we have created and integrated as Web services. You see SMS and location capabilities embedded in Microsoft Office Communicator (creating new ways to reach an identity in your buddy list). You see mapping interfaces in the various soft clients available to you (allowing you to understand where people are in the communications experience). And, you see a social-networking friends' portal enabled to do IP telephony via your internal enterprise calling plan and telephony systems (linking personal and work experiences). Because these are presented as Web services, the possibilities are limitless in embedding and linking network and communications functions into the composite applications experience.

There are many more examples already offered by Nortel to its carrier and enterprise customers but the theme is the same ... if you can combine the capabilities of the network (location, presence, identity, experience ...) with the capabilities of telecom systems (skills-based routing, personal agents, skills profiles, conferencing, dialing plans, multimodal messaging ...) with the new interfaces of social networking, soft clients, unified communications and any other application, you can create new and more effective and efficient experiences than ever before.

While the actual application becomes amorphous in some cases, the result to Nortel is the same: greater numbers of applications that initiate and consume messages, sessions, minutes, calls and capacity – inevitably driving the demand for our systems and playing to our proven strength of scale and innovation. The actual creation of such composite applications also requires expertise, which drives demand for our and our partners' services to assist in achieving these experiences.

This small sample of what we already have delivered proves the reality of the advent of the communications-enabled application and the huge expansion of demand for communications networks and services based on a simple reality ... that communications capability should be close to the data, information and applications we wish to communicate about.