#2, Excellent question, and yes, Nortel has worked very closely with Microsoft and their new equipment in support of unified communications will use the protocols and methods to help network admins, system engineers and even end users, see and use enterprise equipment. I do not know the shipping schedules, but from the information I do have, we reason that the new equipment will ship parallel to SP1 for E2K7. This will include commercial indoor and outdoor wireless routing, access and switching gear, according to Nortel. I do however assess it will be marketed under a different name.
Similarly, highly intelligent switching equipment is supposed to be able to talk to/from SCE and allow engineers to manage enabled devices via policies and interfaces that are a lot more visual - eventually allowing admins to dynamically route and re-route users and groups around network congenstion without losing client systems - e.g., "Late Start? capabilities will be baked into equipment.
So far, it looks like Cisco was staying with its own proprietary software - though recent press reflected that this might change for some equipment. All of the new business centric Cisco/Linksys equipment does support the technology and it is most definately more Cisco than it is Linksys. I have been very impressed with it.
Finally, being involved in a lot of the accelerator beta's has revealed an enterprise wide movement into this kind of management - for example, business desktop deployment, mobile device encryption, centralized management of all related systems and equipment - using hardware aware software, and software aware hardware. It is incredibly powerful stuff, but I do reason that it is going to take years to push down and out. ****BTW, we use some very powerful tools to centrally manage and control the remote systems/networks we support - it is what enabled my business to do what it did/does with smaller numbers of people - so this is an area of very keen interest. My recommendation for system admins is to start into this stuff right now and also embrace all things digital media - be diverse and at the same time, include digital media skills in all one does. The day when when one admin can handle many thousands of systems and networks is rapidly approaching.
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