Enterprise Technology By Phil Edholm

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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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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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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One topic that continues to intrigue me is the relationship between the demand for bandwidth created by the applications we run and the bandwidth available in the networks we use. When these are out of alignment, the system is unbalanced and can create significant operational and user issues.

This thought process led to the Edholm's Law of Bandwidth 4 years ago and thoughts on how to manage delivery of content to different networks that a device might be connected to. You can click on the link to see the article published by the IEEE in 2004. I need to write a quick update to the Law of Bandwidth at some point, and I ...

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I did a keynote address at the Insight 100 Fall Conference in Charlotte this week. The Insight 100 is the user group for customers deploying the Nortel CS2100 and SL-100 systems. There were over 100 customers from a wide variety of segments (finance, health care, government, education, etc.), typically with deployments from 20K plus at a single site to 200K with a centralized solution.

One interesting development that seemed to be taking place across the board is the use of a centralized model for new deployments. Much of the discussion was around the challenges of centralization and issues such as survivability and continuity.

Based on these interactions, I came to 2 conclusions:

The concept of a non-nodal VoIP system ...

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The 2007 Norel Enterprise Vision series is now posted on the Nortel web site and available for viewing. The vision series consists of 7 video segments of about 20-25 minutes each that detail our vision of the industry and the path forward. The overall series can be seen at www.nortel.com/edholm-vision-series. (Update: Link fixed. Thanks Bruce.)

It includes the following areas (uses RealPlayer 8.0 or higher):

Module 1: Introduction and Business Drivers
Module 2: Technology Mega Trends and Hyperconnectivity
Module 3: Nortel Investing to Build on the Changes
Module 4: Architectural Philosophies and Convergence 2.0
Module 5: Unified Communications and ICA
Module 6: Video Collaboration and SOA
Module 7: ...

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Back from vacation - in Santa Clara

As indicated in the last blog, different tasks require different communications modalities. If we plot relationship between the communicating parties on a vertical axis and different Communications modalities on the vertical, we can develop a plot of acceptable communications for different levels of relationship.

As can be seen, while Face to face is critical when there is little relationship, as we work together closely over a period of time we can use communications modalities that have lower content and eventually even non-real-time. This leads to identifying three "zones" of communications; the selling zone, the collaboration zone and the Grandma zone.

In the selling zone, ...

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