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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Once again there is a lot of focus on the energy efficiency of networking gear and the significant differences between products in how effectively they use energy. Nortel is calling this the Cisco Energy Tax, and it can significantly increase the Total Cost of Ownership of a network. I wrote about this in a posting a few weeks back; Green Makes Sense, but I thought it was worthwhile commenting a bit more now that there is more detail up on the Nortel site and on YouTube.

As I commented before, there is a real difference in the power consumption of Nortel data products and Cisco equivalent products. It is enough that if you replace ...

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This blog posting is not about Nortel or technology, but rather more of a personal note. I hope you will tolerate a bit of divergence from me.

It was with great sadness that I noted that Arthur C. Clarke passed away on the 19th of March. While I never had the opportunity to meet him personally, his vision (2001 - the book and movie, defining the geostationary satellite, etc.) were significant contributors to forming both my views on society, but also igniting a passion for technology and the transformations it can create.

Along with Isaac Asimov, Clark developed nuanced views into futures that were driven by the inventiveness of humans and their capability to define ...

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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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From the UK

I spent the day at Leeds Met University. Leeds Met is the largest University in UK and was one of the first schools to join the Nortel Technology Solutions Academy(NTSA). Leeds Met have positioned the Nortel courseware and NCTS/NCTE Certifications as a mandatory element of the MSc degree in Mobile Computing & Distributed Networks.

I went to Leeds to meet with the faculty and students that are participating in the NTSA.   NTSA is a program that Nortel rolled out last year to work with universities worldwide to provide course curriculum and lab products to enable advanced education in communications as well as specific capabilities in configuring and managing Nortel products.

While there I ...

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This week we have both the Nortel Global Sales Conference and the Leadership Forum. As it turned out, I sat at dinner last night at a table with all Black Belts and Master Black Belts. As we talked through the evening, I described how I related across Nortel the impact of Lean Six Sigma (LSS). As we talked I realized this might be a good blog topic.

As Nortel has introduced LSS into our organization, I have been through the LSS Champions training and Leader training, so I have had some exposure to the process without the intense detail of the underlying statistical analysis tools. As an aside, I started my career working for GM and before ...

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I just returned from an extended holiday vacation.  we continued our holiday break with an 8 day cruise to the Mexican Riviera.  It was a great break and a chance to spend some great time with my family as we all went together.

The interesting thing was that the ship we went on had 24 hour Internet access available throughout the cruise, both with on-board terminals and with wireless LAN support throughout the cabins.  The fact that I could connect (at very high prices) throughout the cruise was a new value and a real representation that Hyperconnectivity is really happening.

However, in the interest of family peace and relationships I decided not to avail myself of the opportunity to work all week ...

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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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