Enterprise Technology By Phil Edholm

I was reading an article in Newsweek entitled "Not Made in Japan". The article detailed the challenges that the corporate, educational, and cultural structure(s) in Japan are facing when trying to compete in a world that is driven not by incremental improvement, but rather by innovative leaps. The article details the failure of DoCoMo to leverage it's leadership position in the Japanese market and in handset technology into the rest of the world and the loss of capitalization it has faced in this failure. It further discusses how Sony, originator of the Walkman, lost theMP3 market (even in Japan) to the Apple iPod through a lack of innovation in interfaces and design.

In reading the ...

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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 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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One of the techniques I use and suggest to customers is to ask the question "so what?" to get to the true value of a suggested benefit. The concept is that when a benefit is suggested, the question "so what?" is asked. If there is an answer to the question then the true benefit has not been reached.

For example; if somone says that you should buy their product for use in your IT shop because it is easy to use, ask the question; "so what?" the progression might go like this; users can support themselves..."so what?"....there are fewer support calls..."so what?"....it requires fewer support people..."so what?"....it SAVES MONEY...so it is a COST SAVINGS. If ...

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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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As I discussed in a previous set of blog postings, delivering redundancy is a critical path to assuring overall system availability. For a number of years, Nortel has deployed a patented implementation called Split Multi Link Trunking (SMLT) that uses the IEEE 802 standard in a configuration that is active-active with incredibly low switchover time. When compared with traditional techniques, such as spanning tree or routing, this technique has been judged vastly superior by both our customers and by independent testing organizations such as the Tolly Group. Nortel has deployed this technology for over six years to deliver effective Switch Clustering in a number of Ethernet Switching platforms. ...

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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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When we started the Nortel Enterprise Blog, one of the goals was to develop a forum for ideas from the larger Nortel Enterprise Community. Now that the blog is running and achieving some level of following, I thought it was time to introduce the first guest posting.

This post comes from Brad Black. Brad is Leader Security Solutions Engineering in our Enterprise Solutions Engineering group. Brad is a CISPP certified security professional and focuses on a variety of security issues from VoIP to data centers. He also has extensive experience in architecting campus, WAN, and data center solutions for Nortel customers....

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As I discussed in earlier blogs, both text and the act of typing are limited in their ability to convey both information and collaboration. A recent event in a totally separate field caused me to begin to think if a change is already underway.

Being somewhat of a car enthusiast, I subscribe to Road and Track. In the December 2007 issue, there is a review of the new Ford Focus. One hot feature of the new Focus is called Sync, a technology capability that enables the car to interact with Bluetooth Cell Phones and iPods through the car and using speech recognition. The reviewer waxes idyllic about using his voice to access songs on his ...

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