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Exciting Week
Flying to Dallas
Last week was an exciting week, both from an airline mileage perspective and from events.
I started with presenting to the CTC/STCA meeting in Chicago on Saturday. This is a meeting of both US and Canadian Telecommunications Consultants. The focus of our discussion was the next major transition occurring in our industry, the convergence of Communications with IT Information Processing. Much as the convergence of voice onto the data network changed the role of the consultant over the last 5 years, this convergence will change the role over the next 5 years.
Following this I flew to Barcelona to join with John Roese in kicking off the EMEA Nortel Enterprise Technology Forum (NETF). This is an exciting event that is an intense set of interactive workshops with the leading systems engineers, PLMs, and developers in the Nortel enterprise organization. It provides customers and channel partners a unique opportunity to hone their knowledge and understanding in an open interactive environment. This year was the largest NETF event ever, with 265 customers and partners, an increase of over 100 from last year.
Then, to close the week, I flew to Las Vegas to do the closing talk on at the Nortel NA CIO Forum. In closing the forum, speaking to over 50 key CIOs, I focused on the changes coming in the industry over the next 5-7 years and how they could change the role if IT in companies. Of key interest were th impact that SOA, collaboration, virtual spaces and confrencing based comunications would have on both the internal organization and the business.
All in all, the week showed me two things; first, it is far to easy to travel all over the world, and second, momentum is increasing for Nortel across the globe. The strength of NETF demonstrates the growing momentum in the value of Nortel converged solutions and the CIO Forum demonstrated the continued strategic value organizations see in their Nortel solutions.
