Nortel CTO: Cost, security worry customers

20.12.2005
Peter Carbone, chief architect at Nortel Corp. for nearly three years and the company's chief technology officer since late November, talked with Computerworld late last week about what he called the 'invisible network,' technology innovations that will bring about next-generation networks and how Nortel's customers see the company. A Nortel veteran of 28 years, Carbone also said that security is an ever present and growing concern for companies as they move more of their business operations to the network.

Excerpts from that interview follow:

What are enterprise customers you encounter most concerned about regarding networking? I've been focused on working with customers to understand where they need to be applying technology, and they've reached [out] to Nortel as a trusted adviser. The top worries of customers continue to be with cost and, increasingly, security, as they put more business operations onto the network. Also, network reach is a worry with the mobile workforce [who] work at home and work in other countries, so technologies like voice over Internet Protocol and how IP is evolving to multimedia and Session Initiation Protocol are on their minds.

I personally am a mobile worker and spend time traveling. With voice-over-IP implementations, my office is wherever I open my PC. I can use Wi-Fi and high-speed access and fire up a VPN client to access corporate information. If you phone me at my office number, it rings me wherever I am. I can support full voice- and videoconferencing capability and some of the presence capabilities, all of which actually change how you work. I can just drop into an important meeting and people will be surprised that I'm actually in Japan or England.

Since you mention voice and Wi-Fi, are you developing dual phone capability at Nortel? We have dual-mode capability between 802.11 and GSM and CDMA [wide-area cellular technologies] in the trial phase to allow a user to jump between networks. At Nortel, we have Wi-Fi across the campus with visitor hot spots that allow visitors to get onto the Internet. So, in a sense, the network is becoming invisible to people.

Another example of that invisible network is that I was recently at a partner meeting in someone else's facility and fired up a client to send and receive voice over IP and data. It was based on Nortel MCS [Multimedia Communication Server]. It's becoming so easy to use this technology, and in some ways it's easier to use than a telephone, because if you're in another country and are not familiar with dialing there, you can rely on your own VOIP phone and its familiar interface. And regarding cost savings, we found out when we went to a VOIP system in our own environment that we were able to replace cell phone calls for a savings of US$15 million a year over the past two years.