Interview: Nortel's Project Chainsaw for Enterprise Collaboration

Nortel has been going through an organizational shift, moving from providing hardware to software and services. One target is the increasingly hyper-connected business world with an eye on virtual worlds for collaboration and communication. Nortel recently demoed its enterprise solution, Web Alive, but it's been working on the virtual world under the name "Project Chainsaw" for several years.

"I think we've been interested in virtual world technology for a while," explained Arn Hyndman, lead architect on Project Chainsaw. "We're a fairly large telecommunications, networking company—at least we're coming out of that space—and we're sort of transitioning from in the past focusing on the hardware space to moving into applications and services, obviously with a focus on communications. When you start thinking about the future of communications, there are very good reasons to think that virtual worlds could play a role."

The Need

"The phone is a very primitive and ancient device," Hyndman continued. "We have to type in these primitive codes and dial. It's kind of an anachronism today. And it's a narrow-band channel. In the best of conditions, you're speaking to another person through a highly compressed, mono channel, and we're expecting that to carry the same load as you'd get in a face-to-face communication. To me, the phone is eventually going to be replaced, or maybe superseded in the same way that television has superseded the radio.  That's why we're interested in virtual worlds as a possible alternative."

That's an increasingly important issue as enterprises spread out. Just today, a survey of UK businesses showed that 90% of enterprise-level organizations used some sort of virtual collaboration tool, whether it's the phone, video conferencing, Web collaboration, or virtual worlds. 30% said they'd use them more frequently if they did a better job of replicating face-to-face communication. Even today's commercial virtual worlds can do that, says Hyndman.

" Second life is only just coming into voice," he explained. "Prior to voice it was very low bandwidth with graphics and aways away from face-to-face meetings. But even so, there are huge benefits to having a representation of who you're talking to, even if they're just avatars. Think about it, you can dial into this conference bridge, and we could have 20 people and you wouldn't know about it. That's a deficiency. And it doesn't scale well. If we had 100 people on here and we all wanted to talk, that just wouldn't work. You can't do the casual meet-and-greet like you would in a conference call, but that's something I think is possible in virtual worlds. And it's my opinion that's where a lot of serious business takes place. It doesn't happen during the webinar, it happens when I say to you, 'Hey, you should come over here and talk to Fred,' and then you have a business deal. It's very fluid, and that's hard to do in the binary space of the phone."

Nortel's Work

Nortel has only been promoting Project Chainsaw internally, though customers have asked for it and some have even tried it out, generating "very positive feedback." For now, though, it's a system for research and innovation more than productizing.

Nortel is organized to allow for incubation with mini-projects that wouldn't take root in any of the major divisions, encouraging research and development apart from other demands. Even so, the company is already using its software internally.

"We've done general information sessions with our CTO [pictured above controlling an avatar] reaching out to his employees to hold a Q&A session," said Hyndman. "We had hundreds of people in a virtual environment, all with voice and able to have conversations while listening to John.  Then we rebroadcast that experience in auditoriums. We had a few hundred people in the environment at the same time and then a few thousand more watching it in auditoriums. It was actually a big success."

Nortel is also using the system for training. That's especially important for Nortel  as it shifts from  selling hardware to  services.  That's a cultural shift for the organization that requires more than simple task-related training for a new piece of software.

"Whenever you want to train soft skills, you want to interact with the teacher and also with the other students," said Hyndman.  "You want to develop a culture. Up until today, it's really had to be done face to face, but we're finding we can accomplish those same goals in this environment. It's an easy sell from that perspective. If we don't have to do this stuff face to face, it's obviously way, way cheaper. It's also easier to arrange: you don't have to have a speaker travel with those dates blocked out. The constraints are taken away and you can have all these different sessions."

In one ironic  case, Project Chainsaw is being used to train salespeople in how to sell a telepresence system. The systems, also used for virtual collaboration, require special rooms and setups--a place where training in context is key.

"Our memories are connected in lots of ways you wouldn't think," said Hyndman. "You know, you could be having trouble remembering something about childhood and then all of a sudden you smell apple pie and it comes back. You can layer on these environments and contexts. If we're trying to get our staff to sell  Nortel products, you can do that in that environment.  Some of our people in Asia had never seen these  [telepresence] rooms, which makes it hard to sell them. We were able to put them in these rooms and give them the context. Next time they're in a telepresence room, all this will pop up with the environmental cue for how to sell it. That's all related to those cues that you just wouldn't get in a normal classroom."

Products and the Future

Hyndman repeatedly emphasized that he had nothing to announce about whether Nortel would market Project Chainsaw (more likely under the name "Web Alive") to other users, though, "you can read the writing on the wall," he added.

Even if Project Chainsaw never makes its way to the marketplace, Hyndman said there were still reasons for developing a virtual world collaboration tool in-house instead of relying on public worlds. Part of the reason is simply that many other worlds--Second Life being the big example--don't require that avatars be tied to some real-world identity, which Nortel feels is important for business. The company is exploring ways to establish trust in virtual worlds for business, but it's also simply focusing on the technology itself.

"We're following all these things, but they have some deficiencies and we wanted to be in a position to address those deficiencies," he explained. "We're an incubation product, so we wanted to be very innovative, and that requires some control. The Second Life business model isn't perfect for business purposes, and we know IBM is trying to bring them in. We don't want to just replicate all that. For example, we want to leverage our long-standing history in voice  technology. If you see a product from us, I think you'll notice the technologies built from the ground up." [Note one blogger's positive reaction to a demo of voice in Web Alive]

Nortel's certainly not the only company pursuing its own platform for enterprise use. In fact, we'll almost certainly see more and more products hitting the market over the course of this year and the next. The question for me is always how long that adoption will take, what the space will look like in three to five years.

"I think it'll be done by five years," said Hyndman." I think we'll be well into using them everyday. I'm very bullish about it. We're on the cusp. Virtual worlds have been around for quite a time, but one of the obstacles was that the general computing infrastructure wasn't available. We've kind of crossed that threshold. And there are always other trends, like the gaming industry exploding and this plateau in telephony—there hasn't been a huge innovation in how telephones work. People are itching for something new. Another way things might go is the telepresence group, but I think we'll see both coexisting. That's a high-end face-to-face style talk, but it requires infrastructure."

Virtual worlds, though, will likely only get simpler.

"In five years or shorter, you'll be running it on your mobile and accessing it everywhere," said Hyndman. "Once we  get the basics sorted out [for virtual worlds], the next step is making them work on mobile devices. We've been thinking about that and are very bullish in that area as well."

Comments

[Ai Austin]

I am surprised at the comments from Hyndman about SL low bandwidth graphics and SL just starting to use voice. Maybe he is not really trying this stuff and I can imagine a likely entrant to teh market just wanting to knock competitors. SL voice has been available for some time to those who use the platform serously. I have used telecon systems on Sun, Unix, Netmeeting, Webex, Adobe Acrobat, Skype and many more for conferencing for decades and the SL offering is at the very top level, and easily used. We use it all the time now. As for graphics, if you have the GPU horsepower, ramp up the settings to "ultra" and set the time of day to sunset, and take a fly over your regions. Even in even the standard viewer you will be impressed. And I am convinced more is to come. SL (and Opensim using the same viewer) offer a platform NOW. Ai