Last week was an exciting time at Global Connect. After an opening reception Sunday night hosted by Mike Z, the sessions kicked off Monday morning with a keynote featuring Mike Z, Joel Hackney and yours truly. Joel talked about the overall vision and strategy for the enterprise business, while I focused on how our products and solutions are changing the way our customers do business. The session was well received and reflects the continuing value that Nortel is delivering to our customers.

In an exciting announcement todayhttp://www2.nortel.com/go/news_detail.jsp?cat_id=-8055&oid=100257409&locale=en-U S, Nortel has extended a LIFETIME WARRANTY to all 2500, 4500 and 5000 series Ethernet Routing Switches. The new lifetime warranty is the best in the industry including:

• Lifetime next business day replacement of failed Hardware. Rapid replacement in the event of malfunction minimizes downtime and service interruption for your mission critical operations.

• Lifetime Level 1 Software support. Up to Level 3 for the first 90 days after purchase, ensuring seamless integration and business continuity.

I am flying this weekend to the International Nortel Networks Users Association(INNUA) Global Connect event in Pittsburgh. Global Connect starts this weekend and continues through Wednesday. it is a great opportunity to immerse into the Nortel products, communications, UC, and networking.

While at the event I will be doing some specific sessions and talking with a large number of customers. Global Connect includes the Insight100 group focused to the SL100/CS2100 large systems as well as the Nortel Enterprise technology Forum (NETF), an event that focuses to the technical implementation issues that architects face in engineering large scale systems.

In the last installment of the series on the dimensions of communications the topic was sensory interfaces, but we focused on video as a Visual medium. In this post we will continue focus on the visual aspects, specifically Immersive environments.

In the last installment of the series on the dimensions of communications the topic was sensory interfaces, but we focused on audio. In this post we will focus on the visual aspects, specifically real time video.

I wanted to put in a quick post to let everyone who follows this blog know that the Nortel Technical Journalfor for thefirst half 2009 has been released and is on-line. That is right, it is ON-LINE only...with the Nortel focus to being a green supplier and a investing in protecting the environment we made the decision to transform the NTJ into an on-line magazine that we will update every 6 months or so. This issue has articles about the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Network, Innovation both inside the company and with the custoemr, and critical wireless technology.

Please chech out the 1st Half 2009 Nortel Technical Journal HERE

In the last installment of the series on the dimensions of communications the topic was the control plane. This post is focused to the Sensory Interfaces that can be used by people when communicating. Sensory interfaces are the mechanisms that we can use for communicating. Essentially, as human beings, we have 5 sensory inputs mechanisms; hearing, seeing, touch, smell, and taste. While smell and taste may have some value in certain social forms of communications I will argue they are of minimal value in business oriented communications and the need to replicate them over distance is not justifiable to the cost. Therefore, we have essentially 3 primary forms for business; audio, visual and physical.

In the last installment of the series on the dimensions of communications the topic was the transport. In this post the topic is the control plane level. The control plane is the dimension responsible for managing the establishment of connections between communicating entities. It started as call control in the PBX arena where it maintained the call state of devices and instructed the TDM switching plane to connect two devices (or a device and a trunk) together.

In the previous postI introduced the concept of a layer (or partitioned model)of the functions of communications. in this and the next few posts I intended to discuss the different areas in more detail. The model is shown below, in this post I will focus on the transport level. In each subsequent post I will take a single level and discuss the transformations in that area that are coming in the future.

The transport dimension has obviously been the place where the large transformation has occurred over the last 5 years as the transport migrated from traditional TDM infrastructure to an IP based infrastructure. This transformation, while having significant potential cost impact, has had little if any real impact on the function of communications.

Over the past few weeks I have been working with my team to define the dimensions of communications going forward and I thought it would be interesting to share on the blog. This will be a multiple post as I go through the dimensions and then discuss some of the research that we are driving in the dimensions. Over the next few blogs I will discuss in more detail each of the areas, but this was intended to be an outline.

The following chart is a structure of the dimensions of communications.

An area of interest for me recently has been how the iPhone and iPod can be used as part of integrating communications in the enterprise. The iPhone has some serious limitations as the design of the APIs limits the capability of running communications applications when the cellular phone is operating and does not allow background applications from third parties (this is primarily for battery usage reasons as I understand). This makes it difficult to have an application that receives interaction requests as it is only available if it is the active app (so you cannot be listening to your music and receive a call). The capability to remotely interrupt and start an applicaiton has relatively large time windows, so this becomes impractical.

So for the iPhone, the best way to integrate seems to be through the cellular phone with control through the browser.

The first major deployment of web.alive rolled out at CES as the Lenovo Lounge. The immersive virtual environment and 3D audio provided by web.alive is a simple way to create an environment that enables people to interact in a new and profoundly differnt way. Lenovo is using it to provide an interactive environment where customers can interact with specialist to understand the value of specific Lenovo models and to reduce the loss of customer opportunities due to the complexity of the PC buying process.

An interesting post from virtual world blogger Dennis Shiao can be found at Lenovo's eLounge Virtual World. As a keen observer of the space, he quickly recognized the unique values that Nortel has brought to the space; ease of use, simple interactions and powerful capabilities.

For Christmas, our daughter, who is in university, wanted a small video camera. After some research and investigation, I bought the new HD version of the Flip video camera. This is a small (size of a thick iPod) device that has 60 minutes of internally cached HD (720P) video and is easily uploaded to a MAC or PC through a pop out USB connector. All this costs a little over $200. It is really hard to imagine all that capabilty for less than the cost of a really good steak dinner.

While the device itslf is cool, it is the potential applications that strike me as being most interesting. For the 20 somethings, the application is videoing your life so you can put it on YouTube, FaceBook, or MySpace (or embarass your friends with the foibles of their lives). However, I really began to wonder if ths is not a viable business tool. For example, what if I could capture all of my presentations/discussions with customers? Could this begin an era of social video for business? Should this blog become a video discussion with examples of those discussions.

I wanted to close out before the holidays with a blog post around getting together for the holidays. For us it was a huge challenge as my daughter goes to school in Oregon and had a final on Saturday. Then on Sunday she was flying home from Portland. For those of you who have not been following, the Pacific Northwest was hit by a huge storm over the weekend that has been described as the storm of the century. After waiting 2.5 hours to get a taxi to the shuttle to Portland, she finally was on her way on Sunday...until her flight was cancelled. This stranded her, with thousands of other's, at Portland airport. Luckily she had some friends who already had a hotel room, so she was able to spend the night with them.

So, immediately travel central went to work at home, tracking flights, holding and buying tickets (focus to refundable) and monitoring all activities. The airline she was on said they could not get her out until Wednesday afternoon (and they wanted to charge an extra fee for an alternative airport). So we bought or held tickets on 4 other airlines. All while texting and calling using cell phones. Finally, on Monday afternoon she got on a flight she was wait listed for and was home in time to go to the play we had tickets for in the evening.

Finally the wireless vendors are enabling WiFi on their device. And it is not driven by voice minutes, it is driven by data. At&T is encouraging their iPhone users to use WiFi as a way to move a significant amount of traffic off the 3G network onto the users WiFi network. With iPhone users consuming up to 50 times as much data as other smart devices, this movement is critical. In fact, over 18 months ago Nortel commented that with only 6% of the users in a 3G cell using video, the cell capacity would be saturated. I already use the WiFi capability of my Blackberry for data whenever there is an available network. In my home I use the WiFi all the time for this purpose.

What makes this interesting is that it is confirmation of something that I argued over the last few years; that voice services would not be the primary driver of dual mode devices. This was based on the belief that voice would be an increasingly small part of the traffic as the top bandwidth of the network increased. As the actual cost for voice transmission decreased, the ability off the wireless carrier to actually capture large revenue differences based on minutes would decrease. If minutes actually became "free" and were therefore not precious, there would be little reason to move to the WiFi network for voice (except where there were coverage issues). Both the advent of moving the data off and the capacity that clears seems to be increasing this path.