Enterprise Technology By Phil Edholm

Well, I think Kermit (the Frog) was wrong.......it is easy bein' green.....for Nortel customers anyway. And especially when bein' green comes with great financial dividends as well.

The last couple of months have seen a swirling of points and counterpoints about what it means to be green in networking... it all started with some strong points by Nortel back at InterOp that the Nortel data products were much more energy efficient than some key competitors. While I have been looking at other areas, the information keeps piling up that Nortel is really a much better solution than Cisco.

In fact, a NEW TOLLY REPORT of a complete converged network including VoIP under different loads shows Nortel uses 40% less ...

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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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Sorry for the lapse in posting....I went to Hawaii with my wonderful wife to celebrate our 3th wedding anniversary and totally forgot to get the posts up........I hope that is a good excuse!!!!

I saw this recent article in Popular Mechanics about "bionic contacts". The thing I find interesting about this concept is the need for continuous communications to the wearer. While I have advocated the concept of caching as a mechanism to reduce the amount of real time traffic (for video for example), this will actually define an environment where continuous communications could be incredibly valuable and change many things.

First off, it brings a new meaning to Hyperconnectivity. For example if you overlay a ...

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Nortel has added a new blog to the Nortel Blogshere; the Nortel Hyperconnectivity Blog. It is at www.hyperconnectivity.com and will focus on posts about the events driving and being driven by the Hyperconnectivity phenomenon.

The blog will look at the Hyperconnectivity revolution from the view of Nortel's key initiatives addressing the Hyperconnectivity challenge - UC, WiMAX, 40G and Telepresence. The intent of this blog is to introduce a variety of topics that center around Hyperconnectivity and will enable the dialog to be much faster.

For example, recent posts discuss the challenge of working (and playing/living) in the Hyperconnected world and whether the business value of telepresence is real or not. Also, 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 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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