November 10th, 2008
Nortel’s Loss, Good News for the Enterprise
As I was reading about Nortel’s rerun today, I was thinking that there might be a silver-lining in all of this for enterprise folk. The bad news, of course, was Nortel’s $3.4 billion loss reported for the third quarter, its worst loss since 2001. That means since Mike Zafirovski took over as CEO in 2005, Nortel has lost more than $4.5 billion. Yikes. The net result is that 1,300 jobs are going to be cut. (If you’re one of those unlucky souls, my heart goes out to you. I hear about jobs in the tech industry all of the time. If I can help you find one you know where to reach me.)
The thing is, the only division that showed remotely positive performance in this macabre report was the Enterprise Solutions group. Revenue for Enterprise Solutions was $616 million for the quarter though that was eight percent less than a year ago, it represents a one percent increase over last quarter. Nortel attributed the drop since last year to the completion of certain customer contracts that did not repeat into 2008. Even more promising was that IP telephony revenue grew by 17 percent compared to a year ago.
Now here’s where it gets real interesting if you’re enterprise buyer looking at Nortel. The company’s approach to those numbers is to get rid of the matrix-management and move back and refocus around vertically-oriented business units. As of January 1, 2009 marketing, R&D, sales and integration services (as well as other previously centralized functions) are being split up and moved back into the individual business unit.
Practically, what this means that Enterprise Solution will have better control over its resources. It will be able to invest R&D dollars where it sees fit and not vie for the attention of Nortel’s centralized R&D organization. With marketing and sales dollars under its control, Enterprise will also be able to respond more quickly to the market, at least that’s the theory.
“Bottom line is that while a matrix structure can better leverage R&D across products and better coordinate marketing efforts to adapt to changes in market conditions, a vertical structure is more efficent and allow for rapid changes to the market conditions, Bo Gowan wrote to me this morning. Gowan is in charge of Nortels corporate communications for new media.
Now it will be interesting to see where Joel Hackney, the president of Enterprise Systems, puts his attention. One area to keep an eye out for is in the collaboration space. Nortel lacks a compelling alternative to a WebEx or Sharepoint service.
There are rumblings though that this could change. Amongst the R&D functions that will move over to Enterprise Solutions is Nortel’s Innovation Lab, an innovation program that uses a VC-like structure to identify and fund new projects within the company. Many of the projects in the Innovation Lab are enterprise-focused. One such program being prototyped that I’ve written about in the past is what was codenamed Project Chainsaw and more recently WebAlive, Nortel’s answer virtual world platform. Other prototypes show integration between Nortel presence and telephony capabilities and Facebook.
Granted these sorts of capabilities today hardly make an enterprise offer. I’ve written a fair amount about virtual world use in the enterprise and the challenges they face. While I think there’s tremendous promise to the technology there are still too many kinks and enough value add yet to make them a compelling alternative to a Cisco WebEx Connect, for example.
Nortel has some good ideas on how to make virtual worlds a compelling solution for business and tons of experience in selling to the enterprise. What they can’t account for is a tough market that will likely eye any collaboration initiative in 2009 with tremendous suspicion. Emphasizing the ability of a WebAlive (or some permutation of such) to cut travel costs, may be the door opener that Nortel needs to engage IT in a fruitful discussion about collaboration – if something new could be said by now. It could certainly be the kind of game changer that Hackney needs to distinguish Nortel’s enterprise play.
September 24th, 2008
Why You Want WebEx Connect or Beehive
First there was Notes and then Exchange. This week the collaboration suite space got a lot more competitive with both Cisco and Oracle introducing new collaboration suites.
This morning Cisco will announce WebEx Connect as part of a broader Unified Communications push that also includes Cisco Unified Communications Release 7 and Cisco Telepresence Expert on Demand. WebEx Connect is an open collaboration space that pulls together voice Instant Messaging, Web conferencing, video conferencing, e-mail, calendaring, and discussion boards. WebEx Connect also supports widgets for extending collaboration capabilities. Release 7 adds 100 features to Cisco’s UC platform. Telephony Expert on Demand is a Telepresence kiosk so branch offices can share experts located in the main office.
The news comes on the heels of Oracle’s Beehive announcement this week at OracleWorld. Beehive is an open, integrated communications system with instant messaging, video conferencing, and e-mail. (See Larry’s summary and video of the Beehive launch and Dana great analysis of the economics underlying enterprise messaging. )
Clearly both vendors will target their installed bases and many will adopt the technology due to a common sales and support structure. But for those evaluating the application in the context of Notes and Exchange what will they offer that the existing incumbents lack?
For Cisco, the emphasis will be on three points:
- Delivery Mechanism. WebEx Connect is delivered as Software As A Service (SAAS) so overhead costs should be be significantly lower than with a premise-based solution, such as Notes and Exchange. Larger organizations will prefer the flexibility of hosted based solutions, but Small to Medium sized Enterprise (SME) will like the lower costs associated with SAAS.
- Tighter Integration with Unified Communications. Cisco will argue that WebEx Connect focuses on pulling together real time elements in tighter way than Notes or Exchange. By contrast, Notes and Exchange users will only get the benefits of real time collaboration with the integration of SameTime or OCS..
- Open standards. Cisco will emphasize that it’s built on open standards.
For Beehive, Oracle is playing up what it calls Collaboration Fragmentation. As a result of the different collaboration applications, there’s been a increase in the number databases, ways of identifying users, managing users, and not to mention security credentials. Oracle will in turn emphasize its database, identity management suite and other applications underling Beehive.
So there you have it: traditional messaging platforms or the new real-time-centric or IT-centric communication platform. Which will you choose?
September 14th, 2008
Immersive Cocoon: The Answer for the 3-D Internet?
As some vendors struggle to define the 3-D interface within the confines of today’s tools, visionaries are moving beyond conventional boundaries.
The Immersive Cocoon is a carbon fiber shell that surrounds the user in a 360o display. Users enter navigate the virtual spaces on the display through body motions based on technology from John Underkoffler, a former fellow of MIT’s media lab. Underkoffler’s research inspired the interface popularized by the movie “Minority Report” and allows users to move objects through hand and arm gestures or alternative speech commands.
Explore the Mayan temples. Travel to distant galaxies or just workout back at home. The applications for the Immersive Cocoon are numerous. Online book shoppers will be able to grab a book in a virtual space instead of having to click on it. Gamers will walk through a space instead of clicking on keyboard. Teleworking would become even more immersive than today’s Telepresence.
Initially the technology will be targeted at corporations for internal use. NAU is said to be looking at developing a line for executive airport lounges. Users will be ultimately able to buy time in a public Cocoon via their laptops or smart phones.
September 8th, 2008
411 and DNS: A Global SPAMbase?
Tired of managing a bazillion phone numbers and email addresses? Try storing them in DNS.
This December, new .tel domains will let individuals store all of their contact information within DNS. With a single location, presumably getting in contact with someone will be as easy as a hitting your closest search engine.
And it’s not just phone numbers or email addresses that can be stored. While regular DNS entries only store rudimentary contact information, the .tel domains will be able to hold five kinds of information.
- Contact information will contain telephone numbers, IM and email addresses and personal keywords for describing oneself.
- Links can be embedded to any website, such as one’s LinkedIn profile or corporate website.
- Digital identities used across games, SecondLife and other online services, can be stored .tel domains..
- Support for geolocation information will let users store their mailing addresses.
- Finally, indexable text can include any of the above information as well as a user’s own custom messages.
Protecting all of this will be two levels of security. Users will be able to designate data as public or private. To view private data, users will need to request access or “friending”” as Telnic calls this process. Users can also designate which private data should be exposed to a given “friend.”
All of which sounds great, but there are two things bothering me. Today, most of us already have some kind of personal web site, Facebook or Linked In profile with our contact information. Do we really need yet another way for folk to find us?
What’s more based on Telnic is saying about the “friending” process it doesn’t look like there’s any sort of digital certificates or identity checking going on. So the friend that you’re sharing your personal contact details may be just another spammer.
September 8th, 2008
Are browsers the answer for the 3-D Web?
Just got back from a camping trip in northern Israel when I saw this release announcing GoWeb3D, a new virtual world venture that will bring virtual offices, conference rooms, classrooms, exhibit halls, and retail spaces to the Web.
GoWeb3D is the latest of a string of announcements over the summer around the merging of the virtual world space with the browser. Electric Sheep Company announced WebFlock, a thin client v-world for under $100,000. Google introduced Lively in July and then this past August, Altadyn released its next generation thin-client, 3DXplorer. GoWeb3D is using 3DXplorer as the basis of its technology.
Thin clients are game changers. As I laid out in my report on virtual worlds, today’s virtual world applications aren’t appropriate for the enterprise for several reasons. They take too long to install and consume too many resources on the client. They’re not appropriate for the casual visitor to a web site or browser. Thin clients don’t require pre-registration or complicated software downloads. As such thin clients expand the universe of potential visitors from subscribers to a specific platform to any visitor to a web site. It’s sort of like the difference between a full fledged IM client used for daily communication and Java enabled applet that’s initiated when for customers to chat with a sales rep at a web site.
Philip Rosedale doesn’t see it that way. In an interview with TechCrunch, the SecondLife CEO dismisses the threat of browser based virtual worlds. He points out that SL has open sources its client hoping that it would be adopted as soon as possible. At the same time, he dismisses the threats of thin clients pointing out that they lack the functionality of thick clients.
But the properties that have made SecondLife so successful aren’t needed by thin-clients. They’re just a part of a broader push to develop photorealistic 3D worlds underlying the next generation Internet. With players like Google and Microsoft pushing the development of the rendering frameworks and cataloguing buildings, web browser-based virtual worlds won’t require the rendering tools available in SecondLife. Google’s 3D Warehouse, for example, provides enterprises with all of the building samples they’ll need for creating a 3D world. Ironically, Google’s own Lively will not be able to import buildings from 3D Warehouse; 3Dxplorer will include those buildings.
By being part of a broader eco-system, browser-based 3D clients can rely on other parties to deliver functions needed for constructing a 3D world. And for enterprises, the 102 avatar styles or realistic rippling water effect so important to gaming systems aren’t nearly as important as security, availability, accounting for regulatory compliance, and interoperability.
On this last point there’s good news. While the virtual world interoperability continues to be way off, thin-clients, such as 3Dxplorer, solve the problem to some extent by allowing visitors to login with the same identity from other company’s virtual worlds running on the same platform.
At the end of the day, 3D vendors will need to show their technology will improve the visitor’s experience to a site if they’re going to be successful beyond hobbyists or casual gamers. Certainly, the enhanced social experience becomes part of that value. Building community is important for any web site. There’s also the ability to lead someone through an online experience and show them what they may want to see. The ability to have on avatar lead another through a virtual space would be helpful on this score.
July 30th, 2008
Eight pitfalls of predictive markets
Predictive markets sound like such a great idea for determining what will work in the market and what won’t. But misplaced trust in these markets can spell gloom and doom for many an organization. Here then are eight problems you’ll want to avoid as spelled out by Google and Best Buy and others in a recent roundtable run by McKinsey & Company.
1. Garbage-in-Garbage-Out - Predictive markets aren’t magic. By their very nature it depends on the quality and quantity of participation. Even smart individuals with in sufficient access to the right data will make poor predictions.
2. Lack of participation – Predictive market initiatives require rich involvement on the part of informed, diverse individuals. More important than lacking the number of people are not providing individuals with the access to available information needed for making informed decisions about their investments
3. Watch the optimism – Positive news and feelings tended to drive outcomes higher. Google found that new employees, for example, who were more optimistic about the company or when the stock performed well traders tended to result in people betting that good things would happen to Google, says Bo Cowgill, product manager at Google who has managed the company’s prediction markets for two and a half years.
4. Avoid extreme events. Google noticed that its traders undervalued extreme events, whether they were good or bad. When Google posed contracts with multiple outcomes, such as forecasts about the number of Gmail users, —the highest and the lowest outcome happened more often than the market expected.
5. The water cooler effect. Google found that that beliefs tend to cluster together. Individuals who sat and worked alongside one another, down to feet and meters from one another, tended to bet in similar ways. Geography was more important than work relationships, socializing outside of work, and language.
6. Watch the enemy - Best Buy found that employees tended to underestimate the competition or to think they knew more about them than they actually did. “Our prediction markets have not had a very respectable accuracy on anything related to our main competitor,” says Jeff Severts the vice president and general manager of Geek Squad, the services arm of Besty Buy, the US consumer electronics retailer
7. Air cover is key –Corporations need to be willing that an important initiative may fail. Too often, that’s not the case, which calls for senior executive sponsorship. “Air cover is key or you’ll find yourself trading on what kind of casserole we’re having in the cafeteria on Thursday,” says Severts.
8. Legal Trouble – Predictive markets deployment broaden the accessibility to sensitive information. How the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) will view that matter is anybody’s guess. “Take the employee who sees a prediction market price on her dashboard and realizes, with some degree of confidence, that a certain drug is going to be a success,” says Todd Henderson, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago Law School, ”Is it illegal if she trades on this information in the real stock market? Is she an insider because she now has information that only a few top people had before? What kind of disclosure obligations does that put on a US public company? Gambling laws are another issue. Should prediction markets be viewed as an unregulated form of betting? These are enormous question marks for US public companies.”
July 28th, 2008
Software that Makes Your Company More Entrepenuerial
A class of social software is helping companies become more entrepreneurial and none a moment too soon.
In a survey of 300 business executives, Interminds LLC, a management consultancy, found that nearly three quarters (71 percent) of business executives indicated that innovation was stagnant in their organizations.
This isn’t because innovation isn’t important to the organization. Interminds found that 87% of senior executives ranked idea generation and innovation as extremely or very important to the continued success of their companies.
Maintaining the entrepreneurial spirit remains a challenge for any growing company, but especially so for larger organizations. And it’s only going to get worse. For today’s emerging workforce, the gen Yers and Zers, the Oprah phenomenon has become their personal mantra. From MySpace and Facebook pages to Blogs to YouTube, these employees are far comfortable promoting themselves than previous generations.
Such a dynamic poses a huge challenge for organizations, particularly large organizations, where new employees are often expected to put the organizational brand before their personal brand.. They’re expected to advocate for the company beyond any core job description with no direct financial gain for their efforts. A clash then between the personal and organizational brand emerges. Emphasizing organizational good and disregarding the most basic motivator for innovation, personal gain, risks encouraging uninspired employees. Individuals without “skin in the game” will ultimately see little reason to innovate for the organizational good.
Now for the good news.
The extent to which companies harmonize organizational branding and personal branding is the extent to which organizations become more entrepreneurial, more creative. By creating a structure in concert with the corporation’s betterment that encourages and rewards personal branding, individuals will be encouraged to explore new ideas, new products and new ways of thinking. Both the individual and the organization branding improve. Both benefit.
Interminds found that of the 14 percent of business executives with a formal process in place for developing ideas, 84 percent were satisfied or extremely satisfied with the results they received, explains Bill Townsend, president of Interminds and the John F. Schoen Entrepreneur in Residence at the Hankamer School of Business at Baylor University.
Yet those numbers improved significantly when a formal rewards systems for encouraging branding was put into place. Of the four percent with such a formal reward system, developing new ideas, 98 percent of executives were satisfied or extremely satisfied and 96 percent could point to substantial to significant ROI results.
The implications for business organizations are numerous. Here are just three of them:
Establish a formal system for rewarding employees for new ideas –Townsend recounts the story that of one secretary who designed a field employees reporting system with an estimated five years savings was $1.5 million. She was paid 50 percent of the first year’s savings of $304,000, or a check of $152,000. Talk about motivators.
Create a process for stewarding ideas from conception to implementation – Here’s where social software is particularly powerful, especially Idea Creation and Predictive Market software. Blogs, wikis, and social networks – all are powerful tools for personal and organization branding. Idea creation and predictive market software, from vendors such as ConsensusPoint, IdeaCrossing, IdeaWicket, Inkling, NewsFuture, and Spigit, provide the motivation for using those tools. They impose a structure to varying degrees of targeting the best ideas in an organization and then helping to bring them to fruition.
Consider making entrepreneurial resources and repositories available to the company – Provide employees with access to information and resources to validate their ideas. Make it easy for them to construct the necessary business plans that should be underlie any well thought out idea.
Are there problems with devising a inspiration system based on software? Yup. And tomorrow I’ll tell you six of ‘em that Google, Best Buy and others cited in their own deployments or analysis of these platforms.
July 22nd, 2008
Open Source VoIP: Asterisk or FreeSwitch?
When the time came for a new PBX, Brian Snipes chose to do something a bit unconventional. The IT manager at law firm Hare, Wynn, Newell, and Newton LLP didn’t purchase a commercial PBX, nor did he settle on the open source market leader, Asterisk.
No, Snipes chose to become the first enterprise to deploy the new open source IP PBX, FreeSwitch. Three months into his deployment and Snipes remains ecstatic about his decision. “It was a grand slam,” he says
Open source VoIP represents a small part of the overall enterprise market with its strongest play in small organizations looking for an inexpensive, customizable solution. A Cisco integrator quoted Snipes $111,000 for a redundant implementation complete with switching infrastructure and voice capabilities. Asterisk (or FreeSwitch) would have run him just $60,000.
Yet Asterisk’s critics have long complained about the code’s scalability and quirks.
“Asterisk scales to a reasonable number of connections per box,” says David Cantera, an Asterisk integrator, “but in very large installations maintenance with the dial plan, is a configuration nightmare.”
The same could be said about some of Asterisk’s features. After deploying Asterisk, Snipes was hit with requests for features available on his legacy system. “Some of these I thought I could (and had) worked around with Asterisk, but some I couldn’t or didn’t even know was used,” he says.
Complaints like those led Anthony Minessale II, an entrepreneur and Asterisk developer, to spearhead the FreeSwitch project, an open source switching engine aimed at serving as a class 5 switching replacement. The FreeSwitch group is getting ready to release version 1.0.1 today or tomorrow that will improve the code’s stability and add Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Text To Speech (TTS) to the code.
But if Snipes’ experience is any indication, business may be apt to use FreeSwitch as sort of Asterisk-on-steroids, providing advanced telephony services for the enterprise. For example, SipFoundry, an open source SIP server project, announced FreeSwitch would be the basis for a new open source conferencing server.
Snipes found that certain features while possible in Asterisk were cleaner in FreeSwitch. One such example is call monitoring. With his PBX, Snipes had two lights on an assistant’s phone, one Busy Lamp Field (BLF) for each of the attorney’s two lines. If one line was busy, the calls would roll over to the attorney’s second line. If the attorney was on the phone then both the first line was lit and a new incoming call would roll over to the second line. The secretary could then see when attorneys were on their first line and pickup an incoming call. The problem, according to Snipes, was with Asterisk there was only a single light and all calls come into the same extension or line so the assistant couldn’t tell if the attorney was already using the phone line when there was a new incoming call.
“With FreeSwitch I was able to accomplish exactly what I needed,” he says. “By contrast, BLF (Busy Lamp Field) support in Asterisk is horrible. It was wrong more often than right. You could pickup a handset on an attorney phone, hang-up, and the light on the secretary phone would indicate that phone was engaged.”
A second key feature was call parking. Snipes needed a light on assistant’s and attorney’s phones to blink when the assistant would park a call. This would allow the attorney to pick up the call by pressing the button beside the light. “FreeSwitch offered the feature out of the box when used with SNOM phones, but the feature wasn’t available with Asterisk.
Voice mail was another problem. Both FreeSwitch and Asterisk deliver voicemails as email attachments, but only FreeSwitch supported wav and mp3 formats. That was important because some attorneys had iPhones while others had BlackBerrys and each required a different file format.
Ultimately, Snipes says what really got him was FreeSwitch’s customizability. “I am not a good programmer like the developers, but even I can create small programs,” he says, “FreeSwitch supports writing IVRs in Lua, Javascript, Python, Perl and a built-in XML language.” He says, for example, he wrote a directory application in Lua for FreeSwitch.
At least on that score, Asterisk proponents think their code plays well. “Asterisk is a like a toolbox,” says Cantera, “You just have to know how to use it.”
Ultimately, the biggest challenge for the FreeSwitch group will not be fighting for part of the Asterisk pie, but encroaching on the capabilities of commercial implementation. Open source has come along way in supplying the voice capabilities needed to compete with commercial implementations.
But commercial software has largely moved on from delivering voice services to providing business solutions that involve the PBX. This requires integrating the PBX, with business applications, often through the use of Web Services.
In theory, open source should compete well in this market. The ability to modify the code makes FreeSwitch or Asterisk eminently adaptable. “You can control FreeSwitch with XML-RPC, direct socket connection and any other way you can make a plugin,” writes Minessale in an IM. “There is a layer between the telephone API and the outside world where you can wedge a module to translate it into whatever you want and if you really want it, FreeSwitch can be its own Web server.” In reality, architects will require higher level interfaces or a strong service and support framework to adapt those applications to their business requirements. Whether FreeSwitch and its supporters can deliver that level of hand-holding remains to be seen.
July 21st, 2008
Yahoo and Icahn Reach Agreement
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Yahoo has reached an agreement with Carl Icahn, the activist investor who has been waging a proxy contest to unseat the board and push Yahoo closer to a deal with Microsoft.
Yahoo said Mr. Icahn will join the board himself. The board will be expanded to 11 members, eight current members will stand for re-election and the remaining two seats will be filled from among candidates recommended by Mr. Icahn. Yahoo said the entire board will then discuss any meaningful transaction.
July 17th, 2008
How to make Microsoft Silverlight enterprise fit
A father and son team think they’ve found a way to make Microsoft Silverlight more enterprise friendly.
Navot and Gai Peled who run Gizmo, Ltd., an Israeli startup, enabled their Visual WebGui environment to run any Silverlight application without loading Silverlight’s thick client on the user’s desktop. Instead, Visual WebGui redirects Silverlight calls to a server for processing. Silverlight is Microsoft’s plug-in for rich interactive applications on the Web, similar to AJAX.
Doubling interesting is that the software brings Windows Forms development to Silverlight, simplifying application creation and deployment. Today, SilverLight development does not take advantage of the drag-and-drop environment available in Visual Basic or other development tools.
CEO Navot Peled, the father, acknowledges that the sending calls across the network may in theory make the application more sensitive to network latency, but in practice that’s likely not going to be the case. “VisualWebGui runs 1 Kbyte/s per action, which is very light compared to other such systems.”
The software is currently available and the basic programming library is for free. Additional extensions for Silverlight run $200 to $500 a piece. There are 40 extensions in total.
See David Greenfield's full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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- Nortel’s Loss, Good News for the Enterprise
- Why You Want WebEx Connect or Beehive
- Immersive Cocoon: The Answer for the 3-D Internet?
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