VoiceCon Enews | September 15, 2009

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This issue of VoiceCon Enews is sponsored by NEC

 

Healthcare organizations are facing significantly increasing challenges – the ongoing pressures to improve operating margins while meeting the increasing demands for high-quality patient care.  Register today for the free live webinar and receive additional insight to UC in Healthcare. 

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I’m not the kind of dad who keeps checking his Blackberry all through his kid’s soccer game. That’s because I don’t have a Blackberry. But I’m also not the kind of dad who keeps bugging his wife to check *her*  Blackberry during their kid’s soccer game. Nor am I the kind of Hebrew school teacher who sneaks over to his desk to discreetly refresh his laptop browser in the middle of a Sunday School discussion of Rosh Hashannah.

Such was the power of the Nortel auction.

I don’t have space to give you anything like a comprehensive analysis of what I and the people I turn to for analysis think of the $900 million winning bid that was announced early Monday morning, with stalking horse bidder Avaya almost doubling its initial price in order to win the auction, which had started Friday and lasted through the weekend. We’ve got lots of analysis at No Jitter, and we’ll be building on it all this week and probably beyond. Please check it out.

The auction was weirdly compelling, as traffic on No Jitter and Twitter clearly showed. Weekends are usually a sleepy time for No Jitter, but the joint was jumping over the weekend, even though there wasn’t anything of substance to report. On Twitter, the Nortel Auction Junkies were babysat by the redoubtable Bo Gowan of Nortel PR, who sent out reassuring keep-alive signals and fun YouTube links to pass the time. Bo also was able to use Twitter to shoot down the handful of rumors that sprang up over the weekend, such as the suggestion that maybe the auction’s start had had to be delayed because of Verizon’s last minute filing of objections—objections that remain unresolved as of this writing but seem unlikely to ultimately derail the deal.

All in all, it was a strangely intimate gathering. The Nortel auction didn’t warrant a Twitter “trending topic,” though it did manage to provide an ideal medium for breeding nasty Twitter spam messages that multiplied like germs in a petri dish. The community of those of us who care about Nortel, Avaya, Siemens, and the folks who make them run—that’s still a hamlet compared to the metropolis of Taylor Swift fans who I assume raced to their computers to tweet their outrage over Kanye West’s unconscionable treatment of the young lass at whatever music awards those were. Although, if your outrage is truly something that can be “tweeted,” how angry can you really be? The only thing I could get angry about is that they call Taylor Swift “country” music. Hank’s turning over in his grave, I’m sure.

But what this experience showed me is that Twitter is absolutely an integral part of the way we disseminate information and generally how we inform ourselves about our world. Bo Gowan managed to go three whole days on Twitter without saying anything about what he was having for breakfast, or any of the other trivialities that Twitter-haters love to cite as evidence of its worthlessness. Bo understood his audience, what they wanted from him, and he gave them just that—as much information as he could, as soon as he could. Folks went on with their lives, but stayed in touch with something that was happening in real time, without too much disruption.

I don’t know if Twitter can be more than that, but then again, I don’t know if Twitter needs to be more than that. There’s always a lot of people who need to know a lot of things.

–Eric Krapf

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* VoiceCon Next-Gen IPT System RFP Wiki

* VoiceCon Podcast

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No Jitter

NoJitter.com: Focusing on to IP Telephony, Unified Communications and Converged Networks. NoJitter.com has become the leading website for enterprise communications– daily news and blogs, commentary and analysis of the trends, technologies and management issues.

Check it out: www.nojitter.com

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Each week, the VoiceCon Enews newsletter presents opinions and analysis of the trends in enterprise voice technologies. Our point of view is simple, no hype, just information that network and communications professionals like you can use. We encourage you to share VoiceCon Enews with your colleagues. They can sign up for their own eNewsletter copy on the VoiceCon home page.

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Copyright (c) 2009 TechWeb, a division of United Business Media LLC.

All Rights Reserved. TechWeb c/o 999 Oakmont Plaza Dr., Suite 100, Westmont, IL 60559. TechWeb, VoiceCon, No Jitter, BCR Training, and associated design marks and logos are trademarks owned or used under license by United Business Media LLC, and may be registered in the United States and other countries. Other names mentioned may be the trademark or service mark of their respective owners.

Comments and questions about this newsletter may be sent to Eric Krapf.

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Posted in Applications, Architecture, Equipment, Implementation, Management, Market Trends, Phones & User Devices, Tech Trends, Unified Communications, VOIP |

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