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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I flew out Sunday for the Global Connect event in Dallas. This is the huge Nortel User event that is the opportunity to interact with our customers, partners and a fairly large group of analysts and press.

If you are coming to Global Connect, look me up. I will be at many of the events and look forward to meeting any of you that are there.

I will do a couple of blogs next week from Global Connect. I am doing a session with Bob Hafner of Gartner that is discussing the opportunities in UC with our partners and I think it will create some exciting discussion. I also am talking about Hyperconnectivity and the recent IDC ...

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I found the recent study IDC IDC did with Nortel sponsorship of the emergence of the Hyperconnected worked to be very interesting, it confirmed what many of us know to be true; we are increasingly living in a Hyperconnected world and are ourselves connected everywhere, all the time.

The following is the link to the white paper and the associated materials, I encourage everyone to take some time to review it. IDC Hyperconnectivity Report The report offers some great insights about how individuals view the emerging transformation. It is based on almost 2,400 interviews globally and is the most comprehensive view I have seen of defining the transformation coming.

What I ...

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Last week at InterOp, Nortel created a sensation with it's commitment to Green Technology and demonstrations that Nortel data equipment is dramatically more energy (and carbon footprint) efficient than our major competitor. The Tolly Group has analyzed Nortel data products versus the major competitor and has independently verified the veracity of the Nortel claims (Tolly report).

Green thinking in IT makes both good corporate sense, but it also makes good financial sense as well. Nortel has built a Green Calculator that allows companies to analyze their ROI on Green Networking. For example, a 2,500 seat network with gigabit desktops and IP telephony would save almost $2,000,000 over 5 years with the Nortel Green Network versus ...

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I saw this article in eWeek about the most wanted IT skills and it got me to thinking about skills as a representation of either transformation or challenge. Of the 10 skills listed, Numbers 1,2, and 10 (1 - Security, firewalls, data Privacy, 2 - General Networking, Network Infrastructure, and 10 - RF Mobile-Wireless) are all areas where the networking world is limiting the movement to advanced Information and Interaction solutions due to the complexity of what we do. While the needs in this area can be related to growth, to a great extent it is a reflection of the complexity of the solutions and the inability of the technology and the products to come down the ...

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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 was asked to post a bit about my impressions of Dubai...so here is a posting on my visit. I wrote this on my way home, but other topics that were more time relevant came up so it sat for a while before I was able to publish it.

I spent a few days this week in Dubai, and came away impressed both with the frenetic level of activity as well as the challenges that they are facing. Dubai is growing from 2 to 6 million inhabitants over the next 4 years and they are building to accommodate the growth. In the Marina area where I was staying, there were about 20 towers, virtually every one under ...

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I continue to be intrigued by the concept of virtual worlds and the ability of them to simulate/replace the physical environment. I find the concept of integrating virtual and real conference rooms (Sun has a demo of this) to be interesting. Much as a play is transformed when the actors "break" the 4th wall between them and the audience, this concept has the capability of radically changing both the virtual world (the play) and the real world (the audience). How could the unique relationship between the audience and Ferris Buehler have been achieved absent his initial dialog about; "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in awhile, you ...

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On Turkish Air....from Istanbul to Chicago - returning from A CIO Forum in Istanbul

As I once again sit on an airplane for another 20 hours portal to portal (before beginning my work day back in California) , I am reminded of the promise of communications technology to reduce travel. In fact, somewhere over the Atlantic (or maybe it was Canada), new words to the old Animals tune ..."we gotta get out of this place"... started running through my head. As an aside, there is no intended political commentary here, in this context, it is just a song.

In many ways this is not a profound message, but rather a reflection on the ...

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The 2007 Norel Enterprise Vision series is now posted on the Nortel web site and available for viewing. The vision series consists of 7 video segments of about 20-25 minutes each that detail our vision of the industry and the path forward. The overall series can be seen at www.nortel.com/edholm-vision-series. (Update: Link fixed. Thanks Bruce.)

It includes the following areas (uses RealPlayer 8.0 or higher):

Module 1: Introduction and Business Drivers
Module 2: Technology Mega Trends and Hyperconnectivity
Module 3: Nortel Investing to Build on the Changes
Module 4: Architectural Philosophies and Convergence 2.0
Module 5: Unified Communications and ICA
Module 6: Video Collaboration and SOA
Module 7: ...

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