Enterprise Technology By Phil Edholm

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Global Connect 2008

By Phil June 19, 2008 5:20 pm

This is abit of a belated post as I have been out of pocket for a week or so. I will try hard not to let that happen again.

Global Connect was a great event with attendance up about 38% and it was a dynamic environment.FOr those of you I saw there, it is always great to meet agian (or for the first time).

I did two sessions that I thought were interesting; one as a panel moderator with CIOs for a group of industry pres and the second a joint presentation panel with Bob Hafner of Gartner.

The CIO panel was interesting as it focused on how the results of the IDC Hyperconnectivity survey were seen in the eyes of CIOs. While all of the CIOs saw some evidence of Hyperconnected individuals, almost uniformly they saw it as less of a corporate issue than an individual issue. The discussion was lively and I think Rich Tehrani did a great job in his blog discussing this event and I would suggest taking the time to read it.

The second session was positioned as a presentation panel for Nortel Channel Partners to understand how Unified Communications would change their business. At this talk there were two significant areas of interest. First, as Nortel has stated in our analyst conference, the market for networking and communications is growing from about $41M to about $63 million from 2008 to 2012 as the communications enablement of software applications through SOA transforms the market. Out of this market, we are anticipating about $25M of revenue in 2012 directly associated with UC (this is a combination of VoIP, Voice Applications, SOA Comms Enablement, SOA Comms Composites and associated data networking purchases). What made this interesting was Bob commenting that he thought this view was conservative. Overall this is exciting as this transition provides a huge opportunity in the market. In many ways I think it is akin to the transformation that happened when IT and Processes merged in the 90s and created a variety of companies like SAP and Oracle's app business.

The second are was the discussion that Bob created when he postulated that over the next 3-5 years the Session (call) Processor would move from being in the purview of the telecom/networking organization and into the data center applications group. While the telecom/networking would continue to manage the PSTN GWs and the devices, he postulated that the operation and management of the Session Server would move into the app group. This is a direct reflection of the Nortel belief that integrating our Session Servers, Applications, and Network more closely with the IT vendors (IBM and Microsoft) is critical for long term success.

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Comments

  1. Phil,

    I read Tehrani’s blog. You have the link incorrect. “http” is in the string twice. Here is the corrected link: http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/rich-tehrani/nortel/hyperconnectivity-live-and-in-person.html

    SOA objects (like any other “object”)’ reusability lies in the interface design. The more atomic the function the more reusable it is. Not a difficult concept in theory, but as they say; in theory, practice and theory are the same thing….in practice they are not.

    The work-life balance (for me) is more like work-life interleaving. Because I work exclusively from home (some travel, but less and less) I can work for a couple of hours, then weed in the garden, watch a movie or read for pleasure, then go back into my office and work. I will go in and out of work for most of the day and into the evening because I work in the majority of time zones. I will often take a few months off between contracts to do some serious traveling or work on a personal project. I have operated this was since the late 1990’s and I enjoy it (as long as the work part Is interesting).

    I think the discussion around the call/session model moving into the data center is interesting. I see another interesting morphing as well; that is the breakup of the call model into discreet transactions. It will happen over time as sessions are handed off to applications either for the remainder of the session or for a specific value add task, then back again. Ultimately each transaction in a given session may be served by a different provider and a different equipment vendor. At that point, if a single session server still exists at that point, it will have moved to the extreme edge, into the device itself.

    For me, this means that working more closely with the user is what is really critical for long term success.

    June 21st, 2008 at 10:21 am by many

  2. Phil, I am in total agreement with Bob Hafner and Nortel on the “Call Processor” moving to the center of IT architecture that is the crossroads of applications, and people. The SIP or communication pipelines become “knowledge conduits” effectively exchanging information, man-man, man-machine and machine-machine. People have become more integral to the process, we no longer have to make inquiries in front of a terminal to retrieve information to make decisions. The information we seek will be readily made available through a “knowledge conduit” via the presentation interface of our own choosing!

    June 21st, 2008 at 12:31 pm by Steve Anderson

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