It's now official - the Nortel/Avaya deal has closed. As of today, Avaya has expanded its portfolio, enlarged its customer base and broadened its global reach. I think Kevin Kennedy's quote best summarizes the benefits that Nortel brings to Avaya:

"By combining our complementary technology portfolios, deep industry specific domain expertise, sales channels and customer bases, the new Avaya will redefine business communications and help customers to reduce costs, simplify operations and increase their business agility." In other words, the deal makes both organizations and their customers exponentially better off. Read the full Avaya press release here.

Avaya and Nortel have received a couple of key regulatory approvals (see Reuters story here) for the proposed sale of Nortel's Enterprise business.

As Avaya announced earlier today, we were notified by the U.S. Department of Justice of early termination of the antitrust waiting period under the Hart-Scott-Rodino (HSR) act. We also received regulatory clearance from the Canadian Competition Bureau. While finalization of the deal still remains subsequent to further regulatory review, these are two major milestones reached by our integration team as we work toward our expected close in December.

In the last installment of the series on the dimensions of communications the topic was sensory interfaces, focusing on visual and dimmers environments. In this installment we move up to the tools level, focusing on informational tools.

Informational tools are used to augment the basics of sensory communications to convey more information. When the first caveman picked up a piece of charcoal and drew a mammoth on the wall of the cave and showed how a group could attack it and bring it down he was using a communications tool. The phrase "a picture is worth a thousand words" refers to the value of information tools in the communications process.

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.

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.

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.

I had an opportunity to present a view of the transformation in networking that are coming to the technical conference at National Semiconductor this week.   It was an interesting opportunity and led to a number of discussions.

One question I get quite frequently is how Nortel is using Nortel technology and products in our business.  I am pleased to announce that Steve Bandrowczak, Nortel CIO, and his team have put together a Nortel on Nortel website on the Nortel.com website that discusses how they are using Nortel products to deliver world class IT while reducing overall cost significantly.

I saw this article titled "Dangerous Fakes" in Business Week that I thought was interesting as it reminded me of some discussions I have had with IT teams about the value of multi-vendor solutions for dependability.  In the article there are many references to fake components, but the reference to fake Cisco routers is particularly challenging.

I am writing this post in London where we just completed a formal kick-off of the Nortel participation and sponsorship of the 2012 London Olympics.  The event was an exciting opportunity, in the morning focused on 120+ attendees, including key members of the LOCOG (London Organising Committee for the Olympic Games), a number of Nortel Customers, Partners and Industry Analysts.  In the afternoon 150 UK based Nortel employees attended sessions designed to demonstrate the Olympics and the Paralympics in action. An exciting part of both events was meeting actual members of the British Olympic team, including Peter Reed, gold medal winner in the coxless four rowing, who was there with his gold medal from Beijing.  As he led groups of employees through a rowing simulation, he discussed the drive necessary to catch up from a length back in the last 500 meters of the finals to overtake the Australian team for the gold.   His focus and dedication are truly inspiring, as is the fact he and the rest of the team began training yesterday for the 2012 games.