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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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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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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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 ...

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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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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 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 ...

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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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