Enterprise Technology By Phil Edholm

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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I was intrigued by the announcement of a Creative Technology Video Conferencing System called InPerson recently. The announcement of this system was of interest on two levels, first that it is essentially a small video player with a camera and the necessary internals to do video conferencing, and second that some \ continue to mis-understand the value of video in a business setting. While most video systems are going upscale in terms of size and bandwidth to more directly equal the face-to-face experience, this is a move down below the PC. While it is larger than the Nortel video phones, it still lacks the size and capability to meet the needs of ...

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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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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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Flying from Raleigh to Dallas......

I spent a couple of days this week in Raleigh/Durham as part of an Enterprise Cabinet meeting and as part of that participated in a 2 hour visit to Hillside NT School to visit with their new class of High School freshmen. Hillsdale NT is a New Tech School funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and a participant in the Nortel LearnIt program for project based learning. The Hillside NT is a new focus learning program within the Hillside High School in Durham that is intended to have 400 students. As this is the first year, the program has 100 9th graders in the program. ...

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I decided to wait a while before posting on this topic as there is so much noise on the topic. And I waited long enough that Yahoo turned down the first effort, but I thought a post was still appropriate as Microsoft seems to be undeterred in it's pursuit. Especially as this is the first in potentially multiple consolidations in the space.

I believe this is the logical transition of Microsoft from a "product" company into a services company. While Microsoft has continued to lead in the "product" space, it has not gained significant share in the "services" side of the business. As we all know, technologies and products tend to move down in value over ...

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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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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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