Nortel today declared chapter 11 bankruptcy for its US and Canadian operations (follow the story over on NoJitter.com). Nortel has been around for over 110 years, transforming itself many times over the years. In the last two years, at least on the enterprise side, Nortel has focused on competing with the likes of Cisco as an end-to-end voice & data systems vendor, while differentiating itself via a deep partnership with Microsoft’s UC offerings and a growing partnership with IBM Lotus. More recently Nortel has introduced initiatives in virtual worlds applications and communications-enabled business process platforms.

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That’s the pitch that startup Unison Technologies is making with it’s new free UC client integrating voice, instant messaging, calendaring, and LDAP directory into a single application. The client forces you to view ads, but the company is betting that customers will accept ad-supported software in exchange for not having to shell out tens of thousands of dollars for similar features from Microsoft or other. But it doesn’t look like this is going to fly…..

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The easiest way to predict the future, as Alan Kay said, is to invent it. Some friends of mine, over at a stealth design/innovation startup called WilsonCoLab, decided to start a site dedicated exclusively to this task at www.cloudworker.org, which beta-launched today with a neat contest (seriously flattering to have a word you coined taken this seriously!). Cool logo, eh?

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… I’ve been pleasantly surprised and equally disappointed. Here’s a list of some of the things I love, and some of things I really don’t love about the first phone to utilize the Android OS .

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Google today announced voice and video chat capabilities as part of its chat service embedded into Gmail. This is clearly a shot across the bow at Skype, SightSpeed (recently acquired by Logitech) and Oovoo. It’s also a competitive move against Microsoft Hotmail and Yahoo Mail, as Google continues to evolve it’s mail application into a full blown UC dashboard.

Google’s move is also indicative of what we’re seeing in the enterprise space, as telephony vendors and messaging vendors converge while basing their UC offerings on their relative strengths. Google’s voice/video chat nicely integrates into Gmail, enabling customers to use their Gmail contact list for chat, rather than having to maintain separate buddy lists in different applications. Now, how long before Google repositions Orkut as an alternative to Facebook that is fully integrated into Gmail & chat?

This morning, the big news out of VoiceCon (news on the last day… yay!) was IBM and Microsoft’s promise to achieve true federation between OCS and Sametime. That’s good news for unified communications (although I have to side with the folks who wonder why “federation” is an acceptable solution, when “open-standrads-based interoperability” is really what’s needed). But it’s not news to enterprise 2.0 vendors and users, for whom open, shared access is table stakes. Think about it: When it comes to communication and collaboration, you can’t know in advance who you need to work with; you need to know that at any given time, you can work with anyone you choose.

One of the key ways that UC can benefit an organization is by reducing human latency. The idea is that if you can shorten the time it takes people to find the subject matter experts that they need to solve a particular problem, you can achieve demonstrable benefits such as increased sales, increased customer retention, or greater efficiency of contact center operations.

Most vendors here at VoiceCon San Francisco are spending a lot of time talking up UC as a way to reduce human latency, but few are saying “how” you classify and identify subject matter experts. Typically you hear discussions around grouping people by role, but what is missing is the merging of social computing and UC so that your employees (and perhaps even customers & partners) can self-identify experts based on concepts such as tagging or rating user profiles. It’s not hard to see how a company can integrate something like Lotus Connections or Microsoft SharePoint with Teligent Community server to let your users create the knowledge base that allows individuals to find the experts they need for a given problem.

Aspect has announced that the upcoming GA release of Aspect Unified IP 6.6, scheduled for December 12. The news software will include many new UC-capable features, including integration with Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 to support “ask-the-expert” capabilities outside the contact center and within the enterprise itself.

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I generally view a trend as nearing maturing when the Economist sits up and takes a notice. They now have a special on cloud computing:

As IT gets cloudier, the economics of the business will change

As you might expect from the Economist, they take a moderate view:

In essence, what [Cloud computing] does is take the idea of distributed computing a step farther. Still, it will add a couple of layers to the IT stack. One is made up of the cloud providers, such as Amazon and Google. The other is software that helps firms to turn their IT infrastructure into their own cloud, known as a “virtual operating system for data centres”.

The article is fairly well-rounded and covers expected impact on SaaS players, hardware providers and industry structure. Besides the Economist story, EC2 coming off beta and offering an SLA for its Linux cloud model, and also offering a Windows version, are signs of true critical mass.

All the more reason to vote for cloudworker as the new telecommuter! Incidentally, my neologism made the NY Times yesterday, and also featured in a piece in industry trade site SearchUnified Communications.

Venkatesh G. Rao writes a blog on business and innovation at www.ribbonfarm.com, and is a Web technology researcher at Xerox. The views expressed in this blog are his personal ones and do not represent the views of his employer.

I joined an analyst call with the folks from Verizon today, in which they updated us on their approach to–and services for–UC. Here are a few higlights:

• Verizon sees a lot of interest in UC (thousands of customers are evaluating it), but says that most of them don’t have the technical expertise needed to implement a truly unified infrastrucutre (enter Verizon’s professonal services).
• Verizon believes the high-profile nature of UC deployments also makes failure a scary proposition for IT proponents; as a result, they’re taking their planning and evaluations very carefully.
• Verizon is making a lot of noise around embedding UC into business processes.
• One customer, with 14,000 employees, has dropped its use of Cisco Personal Communicator and is instead relying on OCS and Verizon’s services.
• Cost savings has and continues to be a huge motivator for Verizon’s UC customers.