Enterprise Technology By Phil Edholm

The first UC market is for collaboration. It is about how we converge the desktop productivity environment that supports our Informal Personal Business processes (calendaring, email, etc.) with easy to use tools that combine communications, information, and business process.

The key is the value that comes from having interactions happen sooner with the right tools. UC for Collaboration is primarily about people interacting with other people based on their agendas and personal work requirements. The value accrues to the company in enhancing the way people work, rather than changing the underlying formal business processes. In most business decisions, 70-90% of the time to make a decision is wait time with ...

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Over the past month I have been working on directions in UC and have come to a few key conclusions about this transformation.   I thought a series of blog entires around this subject would be interesting. I will probably do three or four fairly quickly, starting with definitions, moving into market opportunity, and closing with how Nortel sees it's role moving forward.

First, UC is not just about communications, but rather is focused to how communications integrates with applications. While we have been talking about this, I think we should stop talking about "unifying" different communications modalities and rather focus on the application integration component. The key reason is that this is the next big ...

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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. ...

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Doug Gourlay of Cisco recently responded to my post on "Merchant "silicon by putting a post on the Cisco site on his blog. Thanks to Brad Reese for pointing out the reply on his blog on the NetworkWorld site. While Brad felt Doug's response was a "stinging rebuke", I believe that most will agree with me that it was a lame and poorly thought through analogy. While I replied on Brad's site, I thought it would be appropriate to respond here as well........as Doug was really responding to my assertion that using proprietary silicon for packet processing is ...

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I started to reference the issue about the question whether the Internet bandwidth was going to become an issue in a post response last year. At the time I referenced a report issued by the Nemertes group that predicted that the capacity of the Internet would become an issue between 2010 and 2012. The post I did about Microhoo and Google competing to introduce new services and capabilities began to highlight this issue in my mind as well. Then last week I had a meeting with a key technology executive from a major North American service provider who indicated their bandwidth is growing 40% per year and they have begun the migration to 40 Gbps in their ...

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Last week Tony Rybczynski put up a blog on the Cisco Nexus switch entitled "The Nexus is no Lexus". Tony got a lot of comments, including a link that was from the Network World Cisco blog. This was responded to on the Network World Cisco blog by Doug Gourley of Cisco. In his response Doug states; "Certainly companies that have consistently failed to innovate and deliver in the networking segment, that have married their own R&D capabilities so tightly to the merchant silicon vendors that they have no capability for competitive differentiation."

Cisco is well known for a profound inability to innovate internally and a penchant for acquisition as ...

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In a posting a few while back I commented on the potential of Audio IM replacing Text IM. As one of the comments, David brought up a great point I had not thoroughly considered; is text better than audio/speech because of the bandwidth savings? Is it worth the speech to text and text to speech for bandwidth for the savings in network load, especially if we have to add emotion cues and we would lose the senders actual voice.

While I responded in the comments on that posting, I thought some of you might miss the thought process this stimulated and some of the resulting analysis. I have long maintained that ...

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When we started the Nortel Enterprise Blog, one of the goals was to develop a forum for ideas from the larger Nortel Enterprise Community. Now that the blog is running and achieving some level of following, I thought it was time to introduce the first guest posting.

This post comes from Brad Black. Brad is Leader Security Solutions Engineering in our Enterprise Solutions Engineering group. Brad is a CISPP certified security professional and focuses on a variety of security issues from VoIP to data centers. He also has extensive experience in architecting campus, WAN, and data center solutions for Nortel customers....

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One topic that continues to intrigue me is the relationship between the demand for bandwidth created by the applications we run and the bandwidth available in the networks we use. When these are out of alignment, the system is unbalanced and can create significant operational and user issues.

This thought process led to the Edholm's Law of Bandwidth 4 years ago and thoughts on how to manage delivery of content to different networks that a device might be connected to. You can click on the link to see the article published by the IEEE in 2004. I need to write a quick update to the Law of Bandwidth at some point, and I ...

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I did a keynote address at the Insight 100 Fall Conference in Charlotte this week. The Insight 100 is the user group for customers deploying the Nortel CS2100 and SL-100 systems. There were over 100 customers from a wide variety of segments (finance, health care, government, education, etc.), typically with deployments from 20K plus at a single site to 200K with a centralized solution.

One interesting development that seemed to be taking place across the board is the use of a centralized model for new deployments. Much of the discussion was around the challenges of centralization and issues such as survivability and continuity.

Based on these interactions, I came to 2 conclusions:

The concept of a non-nodal VoIP system ...

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