IBM Looks at The Social Workplace

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As you would expect, younger workers have different expectations about social networking in the workplace.

IBM's view of the enterprise "data tsunami" or "exaflood"

IBM's view of the enterprise "data tsunami" or "exaflood."

IBM Blue Cloud: Internet Style Data Centers

IBM’s Blue Cloud is a platform for cloud-based computing, expected to be available to customers in the spring of 2008, supporting systems with Power and x86 processors.

“Blue Cloud" will allow corporate data centers to operate more like the Internet, enabling computing across a distributed, globally accessible fabric of resources, rather than on local machines or remote server farms.

It is, along with Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud, a seminal step towards network-based computing architectures. Sun Microsystems was ahead of its time in declaring that the "network is the computer." But cloud computing is going to fulfill the prediction.

Call it "software as a service" if you like. The point is that we are nearing an era where resources will be invoked from the computing cloud using a Web browser. Policies still will be needed to authorize use of specific resources, to be sure. But the larger point is that computing, storage and application resources will reside "in the cloud," and be invoked as required by users at the edge of the cloud.

There are all sorts of practical advantages. Distributed or mobile workers can simply invoke their services and information from where they are, using a standard Web browser. Everyone always will have the latest version, the latest patch, the latest version or update.

Computationally intense activities can be handled by clusters of machines designed for such intensity. Storage can be invoked, not carried; used rather than built.

If a developer needs expensive resources, they can be gotten on a sort of "time shared" basis, rather than on a "build your own computing center" basis.

Blue Cloud will be based on open standards and open source software supported by IBM software, systems technology and services.

The interesting speculation is about how cloud computing might change the way enterprises think about their application and storage architectures. Given the massive increase in the scale of IT environments, one wonders how they'll assess the trade-offs between "building data centers" and "renting reources."

Up to this point, the enterprise data center has been the penultimate computing resource. Might the "cloud" surpass even local and networked data centers?

Airline Exec for Red Hat

Sometime big has changed when a former Delta Airlines COO takes over as the CEO of a technology company like Red Hat.

Red Hat isn’t a little startup trying to convert people to Linux. It’s a business selling to big corporations. It needs leadership used to selling enterprises.Also, if Red Hat can reasonably expect to compete to supply half of the worldwide server market by 2015, it will really have to scale. Companies like Delta are about systems and logistics, the sort of things one needs to really scale.

James Whitehurst, of course, wouldn't be the first non-technology executive brought in to head a technology company. Lou Gerstner transformed IBM into a services company, using a background of RJR Nabisco and American Express.

The choice shows how mainstream open source has become. Red Hat needs to sell to enterprise executives, with huge scale.

IBM, Cisco Eat Own Dog Food

Cisco, touting the power of telepresence, really is pushing for use of telepresence inside its own organization. Likewise, as IBM touts the value of Web-based tools for enteprises, it is rolling out Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs, wikis, mashups and virtual reality technologies to help its employees be more productive.

IBM's Metaverse virtual reality software is one of these areas. Apparently some 2,200 IBM staffers are testing ways to collaborate with colleagues in the Metaverse.

Ackerbauer said IBM staffers leverage IBM's internal virtual conferencing application through Web services to have online meetings in 3D.

Nortel Launches Communication Web Services

Nortel has unveiled a Communications Enablement strategy that enables Web services on some Nortel products and provides a software-based environment to simplify the creation of customized communications-enabled applications and business processes.

Nortel also is working with IBM to support Service-Oriented Architecture and Web services that allow customers can integrate advanced communications services into business applications.

Nortel recently unveiled Web Services enablement on the Application Server 5200 and Communication Server 2000 IP Multimedia Softswitch, which allow service providers to offer their enterprise and residential customers interactive multimedia communications tools for their websites based on functionalities such as instant messaging, videoconferencing and presence. Nortel has also rolled out extensive Web Services capabilities on its Contact Center and Advanced Speech platforms.

Nortel also is developing a software-based foundation environment that enables network engaged applications or services across a customer's multi-vendor communications infrastructure. It is expected to be available to customers in the first quarter of 2008, and will provide orchestration of real-time services in a multi-vendor infrastructure environment across multiple domains (enterprise, carrier, wireless and wired).

The intent is to enable the creation of communications-enabled applications that are integrated to customers' business processes.

Sametime, Not Same Thing

Watching Lotus Notes morph into something beyond email has been interesting. Rescued from irrelevance when IBM changed Notes into an open platform, Sametime now talks to Ajax, making Notes features compatible with all sorts of Web services and legacy telecom platforms as well (with the Siemens OpenScape deal).

That sets up an unexpected new round of combat in the collaboration space that Lotus lost to Microsoft Outlook some years ago. Only this time, the battle is centered around instant messaging, rather than email. Email is a key feature, to be sure. But IM is key, in part because presence features are getting to be so important.

So do companies in technology sometimes get a second chance? It would appear so. Look at Apple and Sametime.

Web 2.0 Corollary: Email as Content Context

With IBM Launching Sametime and Microsoft getting ready for its OCS launch, we might note a corollary to the trend that has communications being embedded within the context of applications and content. One trend has communications (voice, video or audio conferencing, text messaging, instant messaging, email) being embedded within enterprise applications or portals.

At the same time, stand-alone communications tools such as email are morphing as well. Where today email is a stand-alone communications tool on the desktop, it seems to be pushing in a new direction. It seems to be becoming a tool to coordinate communications or content from RSS feeds, blogs, wikis, IMs, and voice.

Instead of using a document attachment, email might simply point a user to a link that displays a page, a document, a news feed, a site or client where a piece of information or content resides, rather than leading a user away from the message.

Zimbra, for example, pops up other information that embedded in a message. Zimbra retrieves the information and pulls it into the email, instead of opening a link that takes the user someplace else.

So it might not make sense, someday, to separate out a user's "communication" activities from a user's "information" or "content" activities. One will communicate when using or accessing information or content, and use or retrieve information or content from a "communications" application.

Microsoft OCS: Here Comes Presence

Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007 has recently been released to manufacturing, so expect to hear a lot of noise from Microsoft about presence and voice, as Microsoft will be nudging and cajoling third-party software vendors to integrate presence into their applications. Microsoft also will be rearranging market share in the fragmented space as well (Cisco, Jabber and all the traditional business phone system vendors will be playing, as well as Oracle, for example)

And, oh by the way, the effort shows just how real is the danger of communications service providers becoming "dumb pipe" providers.

Consider a typical customer relationship management (CRM) application. A salesperson might be looking at a customer record, and see a list of all email communications that others on a sales team have had with a given customer. There's a problem noted, and the sales rep wants to make sure it is fixed before placing an outbound call to the customer. That means checking with another internal team member. This then entails:

1. Launching Outlook Address Book.
2. Pointing to Global Address List.
3. Double-clicking a name.
4. Finding the appropriate number.
5. Dialing on the desktop phone.

Using OCS 2007 with presence, the process is:

1. Right-click internal colleague's name directly within the CRM record.
2. Choose "Call this Person" or "Send an Instant Message to this Person."

Aside from access to the global IP network, where is the telco, cable company or other access service provider involved?

Unified Communications Stll a Tough Sell...

...at least for many smaller and mid-sized businesses, say researchers at In-Stat. Of course, that's a good thing for newly-emerging providers (can you say Microsoft?). Some providers of IP business phone systems might also appreciate the perhaps longer window of usefulness for their systems as well. Independent suppliers of unified communications platforms might feel "conflicted." Slower adoption means less robust sales now, but also means most of the market remains untapped.

Worldwide unified messaging and unified messaging-capable client shipments will reach nearly 19.5 million in 2011, say researchers at In-Stat, while traditional voice mail port shipments will shrink to zero by the end of 2009.

John Chambers on Surviving the Coming Shift

I had forgotten that John Chambers has worked both at IBM and at Wang Laboratories. That means he worked at companies that were leaders of two previous waves of computing technology. IBM is about as good a proxy for leadership of the mainframe era as one could find. Wang also was a leader of the minicomputer era. That's signficant as Cisco Systems attempts something no other company has achieved in the semiconductor era: leading in at least two separate eras of computing. So what's the most dangerous thing that could prevent Cisco from making history in this regard?

Hubris: the idea that your company is so powerful, so well managed, so agile that it cannot fail, even as a new computing paradigm replaces an older one.

"You have to keep it constantly in front of yourself," Chambers says. As in, looking nervously and constantly over one's shoulder, hoping to hear approaching footsteps before anyone can be seen. "We make Andy Grove look relaxed," Chambers says, alluding to the classic Grove dictum that "only the paranoid survive."

"Transition will happen; not could happen," says Chambers, who is as aware as any executive ever has been of what it would mean to lead in two waves of computing. It would make history.