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 ...

Read the rest of this entry »

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 ...

Read the rest of this entry »

I have occasionally been asked in this blog to step outside of the narrow field of networking and computing to comment on other technical issues of the day. So, in the interests of being a little provocative, I decided to a do an analysis on a topic a ways outside of my everyday world. If you are not interested in a mental thought process in a parallel field, skip this post please.......

I found this article about digital media storage to be interesting. It details a number of questions around both the practice and cost of digital archiving and questions in a number of ways. I got to thinking about the comments ...

Read the rest of this entry »

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. ...

Read the rest of this entry »

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 ...

Read the rest of this entry »

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 ...

Read the rest of this entry »

I was in an office recently that had a 42" wall mounted plasma screen installed. I have always thought that this was an extravagance that more related to the occupant than business, however my recent experience has convinced me this is not the case.

Over the course of a couple of days, a number of meetings were held that I participated in. In almost every one the screen was used to present information used by the group. This included presentations as well as using the web browser to quickly find information needed during the discussion. The set-up included a dock station that could go to either the desktop monitor or this screen. Connected to the dock was ...

Read the rest of this entry »

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 ...

Read the rest of this entry »

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 ...

Read the rest of this entry »

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 ...

Read the rest of this entry »