Virtual tech will 'kill the office'
Nortel CTO looks to Second Life...
Nortel Networks is looking to the next generation of employees to shape the workplace of tomorrow - and high on its agenda is exploring the role of web 2.0 technologies and virtual worlds such as Linden Lab's Second Life.
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Nortel enterprise CTO Phil Edholm told silicon.com: "A lot of businesses have set up a virtual presence [in Second Life] and what they find is what's the point?
"But if in fact I could walk up to the virtual support desk and meet the avatar of the virtual support person which would then find somebody in the company that has the right skills to actually help me that could become of great value."
Edholm said Nortel has been doing some "demos and trials" with Second Life and contact centre applications. It has also been working with universities and students to learn how they use comms technology - with the aim of understanding how to translate the likes of thriving online social networks such as Facebook into a business environment.
All this is with a view to then building these next-generation functions into its products.
He said: "If you get these students coming out of university and they're used to doing their homework with their friends on IM, they're used to Facebook, they're used to virtual worlds - how do you recreate that environment in the work world?"
Edholm reckons it won't so much be a workplace of the future - rather the potential of "true mobile broadband" offered by future fourth-generation networks will mean work is something that is done, not necessarily a place you go to.
Eventually, he predicts, bandwidth across different types of networks will converge so the type of network being used does not impact on the experience of the user - be it wi-fi, cellular or wired. This prediction has been dubbed 'Edholm's Law'.
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In an enterprise context, says Edholm, this would mean 'application transparency' - or "that all of a sudden, regardless of where I am, I can have the same applications whether I'm in a nomadic location or not".
Wireless from A to Z
Click on the links below to find out more…
A is for Antivirus
B is for Bluetooth
C is for The Cloud
D is for dotMobi
E is for Email
F is for FMC
G is for GPS
H is for HSDPA
I is for i-mode
J is for Japan Air
K is for Korea
L is for LBS
M is for M2M
N is for NFC
O is for Operating systems
P is for Pubs
Q is for QoS
R is for Roaming
S is for Satellite
T is for TV
U is for UMTS
V is for Virgin
W is for WiMax
X is for XDA
Y is for Yucca
Z is for Zigbee
He told silicon.com: "In the enterprise world the big reason/driver why we'll go to WiMax is this application transparency... And that has huge impact on business. Because all of a sudden where you do business is no longer constrained."
But while being able to push work beyond the four walls of the office will offer enterprises new - and potentially lucrative - opportunities for doing business, it does present other challenges. As Edholm points out: "As people become less and less tethered to a location, finding the right person at the right time to do a business function is going to become critical."
Bringing comms and applications together to give an intelligent view of the status of a disparate workforce will therefore be increasingly important - factors such as a person's availability, location and even their velocity. For instance, he points out, if you're driving a car, you probably don't want to get a video call.
He added: "Information and interaction are coming together and it's not going to be information technology it's going to be information and interaction technology in a few years."
Gazing a little closer into the future, the next generation of wireless LAN tech - 802.11n - may be able to cut dependency on cables within buildings. Edholm said: "We think we can actually generate by 2010/2011, the capacity of building buildings without wires - which means regardless of where you are within the building you're going to get the same experience."
He added: "The interesting question is when does the 4G network provide you the same experience virtually everywhere?"
And that's a question of infrastructure investment - which is of course the biggest challenge.