We're always looking for new ways to interact with customers - that's just good business. And, we're always tinkering with new technologies. I mean, Nortel was basically built on innovation. So, while it may have slipped under the radar last week, we made a cool little announcement that shows a bit of both.

Basically, we're enabling organizations to trial and evaluate our communications portfolio over the Internet by using the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud technology (Amazon EC2). This provides on-demand access to a broad range of Nortel technologies, including Unified Communications, Contact Center solutions and our Interactive Communications Portal and Agile Communication Environment. And, it allows prospective customers to test out these technologies in a simple, low-cost and risk-free environment. Plus, since it's accessible from an information rich portal , it's a community-oriented site that also serves as a knowledge base for the developer community - it features discussion forums, product documentation, sample applications, source code, tutorials, podcasts, white papers and other shared info.

With the recent emphasis on acquisitions, it has been easy for some to forget that Nortel is still very much focused on closing deals. Nortel's Enterprise Solutions has recently signed a bunch of new contracts across multiple regions and verticals - covering a range of technologies including Unified Communications (UC), Ethernet Routing Switches, contact center solutions and virtual collaboration environments. In a year that has been described as "challenging" - to put it mildly - we are very proud of the fact that Nortel is still seen as a company that customers trust.

You can learn more about these deals by checking out recent press releases on new contracts in the Caribbean and Latin America and public sector wins across the Asia Pacific region.

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.

As I mentioned earlier this week, we held a webcast yesterday to provide more info on Nortel's Enterprise solutions including an overview on the planned Avaya acquisition. I guess it's not too surprising, given all the buzz around the Avaya deal, but the webcast shattered Nortel's record for the highest number of attendees for an online webinar event with over 2300 participants.

In case you missed it, the archived version is now available here.

Highlights from the event include:

David Downing, Nortel's General Manager for Communications Solutions, and IDC Research Director Abner Germanow will be hosting an interactive web event on November 4th to discuss the planned acquisition of Nortel by Avaya, as well as IT networking strategies and technology. To register for the event, click here.

In addition to talking technology, we'll hear from several Nortel Enterprise customers on their recent deployments and why they chose Nortel. And, we'll do our best to try to answer questions about the planned Avaya deal - at least to the extent that we can at this point in the process. The event will conclude with a Q&A session.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Gartner has released their 2008 version of the Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications.  Once again, Nortel has been placed by the Garter analysts in the leader quadrant, both for "Completeness of Vision" as well as "Ability to Execute.