Unified communications

Computer networking trends 2009 from senior Burton Group analyst at Catalyst conference

The needs of the network are changing in 2009 as enterprises centralize their data centers, rely on fluid storage sources and depend more and more on wireless LANs instead of wired Ethernet. At this year’s Catalyst show in San Diego, I spoke with senior Burton Group analyst David Passmore, to grasp what trends will directly impact enterprise technology and what IT professionals need to prepare for in both the short and long term. Here is what Passmore had to say:

1. As the networking track chair of Burton Group’s Catalyst conference 2009, what major themes will you be addressing this year?

David Passmore: From a networking standpoint, there were four areas we thought would be of most interest for our enterprise IT clients:

• Wireless is one because there’s an increased use of mobile phones for both data as well as for voice. We’re also seeing enterprises using wireless LANs (WLANs) often as a substitute for wired Ethernet.
• The second focus is on wide area networking and what’s happening in the telecom industry, with particular emphasis on what enterprises can do to save money. If you’re a large enterprise, your phone bill, for example, is the second largest recurring expense after salaries. Obviously, if there’s any way for large enterprises to save on their telecom costs, then that’s going to be of interest.
• A third area that we wanted to focus on is unified communications, which essentially is an outgrowth of phone systems — where most large enterprises over the last couple of years have been migrating over to VoIP and IP telephony. Now what they’re doing is trying to figure out how to combine these systems with instant messaging and presence and email, and other forms of communication.
• The fourth area is data center networking: most enterprises have in recent years, consolidated their datacenters: So they’ve gone from a large number of smaller data centers to a small number of larger datacenters. In doing so, now they’re beginning to implement server virtualization. They have these large storage arrays. And essentially, they need a new network that can support the IT requirements in a consolidated datacenter. So we’ll be talking about — for example, how to have your network work well with virtualized servers, and with storage area networks based on Ethernet, and trying to reduce cabling costs — a lot of the issues that affect networks in large enterprise datacenters.

2. How have these themes changed since Catalyst two or three years ago?

Passmore: Each of them has their own specific changes. A big emphasis this year given the economic environment is saving money or cost avoidance. So a lot of the discussion is around initiatives that provide a near-term economic payback.

3. Are the trends this year something we can apply to today, or something to think about for the future?

Passmore: Actually, it’s a combination of both. One of the things we always try to do at Burton is to avoid just telling people what’s worked well in the past. We tell large enterprises what they need to pay attention to or what needs to be on their radar screens as they go forward — such as wireless. The fact that, increasingly, communication is migrating from wired infrastructures to wireless infrastructures, and that includes, not just the use of WLANs within the enterprise, but more use of cellular, data and voice networking.

At some point this might actually make the [networking professional's] jobs easier, because they might find that more and more of their enterprise’s communications is actually flowing over a wireless network operator['s] network. There will be less of a need for enterprises to have to run their own circuits to manage their own networks for connectivity between or within their sites.

Right now, it’s more of a burden because enterprises have to worry about both wired and wireless communications, and people will look at that as doubling their expenses.

In the near term it, it may be doubling the expense, especially because enterprises are interested in how they can get those to work together. For example, [users] have a single phone number that works for both your desk phone and your cell phone; [they] have a single voice-mail box that works for both their desk phone and their cellular phone.

So that’s the near-term goal, but longer term, we expect that a lot of the enterprise equipment will go away in favor of people making use of mobile devices and using the cellular network operator services.

To learn more about these trends, Passmore speaks particularly about how to overcome the challenges storage and server virtualization puts on networking pros, in this Q&A.

Google can hear you now

A college professor once warned me never to put things in writing — which was funny given that he was a writing professor. What he meant was that to ensure confidentiality between people I communicated with remotely, I should speak with them over the phone. That way, he said, it would be much harder for a person to publicize or look back on anything said. Arguably, phone call privacy isn’t guaranteed, but between a hand-written note, an email, an IM conversation or a phone call, the audible record was the most anonymous. Google’s recent acquisition of GrandCentral Communications, however, makes phone call privacy much less likely.

As consumer-centric as Google initially set out to be, they just keep either building new useful enterprise applications or acquiring companies that do. This acquisition is a prime example; GrandCentral Communications “provides services for managing your voice communications,” according to Google’s blog entry.

GrandCentral’s pitch is this: “No matter how often you move, change jobs or phone providers, everyone can still reach you through the same phone number.” And the business advantage can be seen in that this technology would give enterprise workers more flexibility: If you miss a meeting or a call, you can listen to it through someone’s forwarded email. When you discuss ideas with your boss you’ll never have to take notes again or run the risk of forgetting an assignment.

But this advantage also comes at the price of having to pay much more attention to the words coming out of your mouth. Editing what you say can only happen inside your head. Once it’s out, it’s there to be heard — and recorded, and posted to a blog and turned into a techno song by Indaba Music users.

Yes, with GrandCentral.com a conversation can go from phone to public forum within clicks. They keep your phone call records in their database and you can forward them to your colleagues, post them to a blog and more. So unless you’re talking to someone in person, any mode of communication through a device may as well be a record of your intercourse.

Let’s not get forget the impact this has on server space and network bandwidth. As the network remains the central core that enables connections and communications, the converged network which carries voice and video traffic across IP networks, is all the more demanding. Some months ago, Cisco’s push for network convergence was said to broaden the role of network pros. But with corporate kings like Google vying for more enterprise voice and video, this is only the beginning of what networking professionals will have to deal with.

Now that workers can easily manage their voice accounts, you may be wondering who is helping network pros manage the voice data on their network. SearchNetworking.com created a workshop on how to manage voice performance on your network, dedicated to this very cause. And if there are any other management tools you’re looking for, let us help you find them and get organized.

On a side note about getting organized, GrandCentral’s FAQ section says “Google acquired GrandCentral because its communications services fit into Google’s mission to organize the world’s information.” That was “to organize the world’s information.” At least you don’t have that responsibility.

And for Google, who does have that mission, thank you for helping me find, through your search engine, these articles on ways you frighten the general public:

• From ABC News: Is Google Turning Into Big Brother?
• From Bill Snyder’s “Tech’s Bottom Line” blog: Google plays Big Brother
• From CSMonitor.com: Big brother isn’t watching - Google is

And believe it or not, there’s an entire website devoted to the topic: Google as Big Brother.

Thanks for reading, watching, and hearing…

Nortel comes crashing down

Farewell old friend

Nortel Networks has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. It seems last quarter’s $3.4 billion loss was the last straw. The company still has about $2.4 billion in cash on hand, which it will use to maintain operations while it restructures itself.

When news broke this morning that Nortel was filing for bankruptcy protection, an old and familiar image popped into my head: that of the starship Enterprise near the end of Star Trek III. Badly crippled in a battle with a Klingon vessel, the faithful old ship started her fatal descent toward the planet below. Captain Kirk and his crew safely beamed down to the planet and watched their beloved ship streak through the sky towards its demise.

But as fans know, the Enterprise was rebuilt and rechristened time and again for countless adventures in subsequent films and television shows. So, too, may Nortel.

Right now, the telecom industry has slowed its investment in new hardware. When will that trend reverse? No one knows. No doubt Nortel’s efforts to sell into enterprise networks are also suffering in this climate. And unified communications is still such an emerging market, the company obviously couldn’t hope to stay afloat with the quality products it’s been producing in that field.

Indeed, this is just the first of what promises to be several collapses in the networking industry. When Nortel emerges from bankruptcy, what kind of world will it find? And will it survive? Lots of companies disappear forever in an economy like this, even a company as old and revered as this Canadian giant.

TelePresence, now yours for an hourly fee

Have you been eyeing Cisco’s TelePresence ever since Vice President Noah Daniels and Russian President Suvarov squared off over one in 24, Season 6?

Well now’s your chance to re-enact your favorite moments, as Cisco begins renting TelePresence rooms to the general public. There will be over 100 rooms to choose from by the end of 2009, Reuters reported, so you and your 24 play pals will have plenty of spaces to choose from, and price points vary from $299 to $899 depending on the size of the room.

Considering TelePresence rooms (and they really are whole rooms, with everything from the carpeting to the tables to the angle of the HD TV’s pre-determined) can run $300,000 to install, a few hundred dollars an hour isn’t a bad deal, particular if travel expenses can be cut down several thousand while big wigs meet virtually instead of globe-trotting around the world (it’s also easier on the environment). And while Cisco’s plans were fairly modest for deployments, focusing on the global 500, this could help push the technology out to a much broader base.

Cisco is also supposedly touting telepresence as an option to bring together people together for distance weddings and births, according to Network World’s Cisco Subnet, but I’m a wee bit skeptical this will develop into a serious market … Do people really want to give birth in a sterile business suite? Maybe one of the lower end, less “total” solutions is more feasible here, but we doubt a whole lot of wedding parties will want to cram into a suite in the Pierre Hotel, however seamless the experience.

Arrgh! Acquisitions and attacks on the high (tech) seas

Ahoy! Just in time for our Talk like a Pirate Day blog post (what’s a weekend late among old salts?), we hear tales of treachery and triumph, of bold moves and dastardly deeds.

First, matey, is the tale of Cisco’s Jabber acquisition. Why would the world’s dominant networking gear provider buy a second-tier IM platform? While you may not actually know anyone who uses Jabber, the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) Jabber is based on has seen quite a few fans, not the least of which is Google which has embraced the protocol for its Google Talk instant messaging platform.

As Cisco continues to make good on their promise to put structure behind Web 2.0-type tools, Jabber is a good place to start: A widely accepted IM standard heartily approved by the geek crowd which also gives enterprises the control they want. And some are also seeing it as a shot against frenemies Google and Microsoft, like the National Business Review’s summary:

IM gains more respectability with the announcement over the weekend that networking giant Cisco will buy Jabber, whose software allows users of rival freebie IM programmes, such as Apple’s iChat, Google’s Talk, Microsoft Windows Messenger and Yahoo Messenger, to interact with each other, plus send messages to commercial grade programmes such as Microsoft’s Office Communications Server.

The article title was even more direct: Cisco guns for Google, Microsoft with Jabber buy.

On a more swashbuckling note, Aruba’s taking aim at Motorola, counter-suing the company for patent infringement:

“The first asserted patent was assumed by Aruba in March 2008 as part of its acquisition of AirWave Wireless Inc., while the second asserted patent was issued to Aruba in May 2008,” the company said, adding that it is seeking a permanent injunction against use of its patented technologies as well as monetary damages.

The WLAN market is treacherous waters, as we’ve reported before, so we don’t expect this back and forth end until one or the other goes to Davy Jones locker.

Image: SearchNetworking’s belated Talk like a Pirate Day cake.

Cisco at VoiceCon Orlando 2008

Cisco has been relatively quiet at VoiceCon Orlando 2008. Well, they did make a bit of a splash today with a keynote address that featured CEO John Chambers and former vice president Al Gore discussing how communications technology can do its part to fight global climate change. I’ll have more on that later over at SearchUnifiedCommunications.com.

However, unlike many of the vendors here, both big and small, Cisco made no major announcements. Every other vendor here killed a small forest of trees to print out press releases about new products, new partnerships and new customer wins. Cisco was content to demonstrate some of its existing flagship technologies, such as telepresence.

While in Orlando this week, I did meet with Alan Cohen, Cisco’s vice president of enterprise solutions. He hinted at some news Cisco would be offering up later this year.

First of all, something is clearly brewing with WebEx, the online meeting technology that Cisco acquired last year.

“I’d say stay tuned to the WebEx space,” Cohen said. “When you look at our unified communications portfolio, our UC product stack, it’s about messaging, IP telephony, contact center, Cisco mobility. But its also about new video and visual products like telepresence and WebEx. You’ll see tighter integration between premise UC products and WebEx products.”

It sounds like Cisco is poised to integrate WebEx into its UC platform as some sort of collaboration space.

Cohen said something is also brewing with Securent, which Cisco bought last November. Securent is a policy engine, which has now been renamed Cisco Policy Manager. Cohen said Cisco will be making an announcement with Securent later this spring and he hinted that this announcement would help companies collaborate with each other.

“The question isn’t, can you and I send email or share files,” Cohen said. “The question is, can I enter your UC environment to collaborate with you and basically be a part of your business in a digital way? You need a policy that says you’re allowed from this hour to this hour to come into this part of my office digitally and see my information stream. Expect to see a lot more on this from us.”

It also sounds like Cisco is getting ready to make some noise in the social networking space by leveraging recent acquisitions such as Tribe.net and Five Across.

“What we see is when you take business unified communications and add social networking, you get collaboration,” Cohen said. “What we’re working on is making social networking safe and reliable for business. You’ll see a lot of that in our product direction. I think you’re going to see a larger vision of that.”

So Cisco has been somewhat quiet this week, but it sounds to me that they’ll be announcing some very interesting products later this year in the communications and collaboration area. Stay tuned.