Earlier today BT Spainand Nortel CVAS hosted an event for BT enterprise and SMB customers at the BT Spain Customer Innovation Center in Madrid. At the event BT presented some of the latest enhancements to BT's iComms Unified Communication service which is powered by Nortel CVAS' Hosted IP Communication solution.

Nortel CVAS' booth at last week's 2010 NCTA Cable Show was busy!

We had many customers and partners stop-by to learn more about ways Nortel CVAS can equip MSOs to deliver advanced VoIP, business communications, mobility and entertainment services to end users -- both residential and business subscribers.

Some of the hot topics discussed in the Nortel CVAS booth were:

• How MSOs can grow their subscriber numbers and use IP to tap into the SMB and enterprise space by providing unified communications and other advanced business services.

This week the Nortel CVAS team will be at the NCTA Cable Show in Los Angeles.

Hosted by the National Cable & Telecommunication Association (NCTA), the event brings together creative visionaries and technology leaders to showcase the latest advances in content delivery, programming and a new world of personal, portable content.

At our booth (#711) we will showcase a variety of innovations that help cable operators to compete and deliver advanced VoIP, multimedia and mobility services to residential and business subscribers. For a complete list of demos, see our press release from last week here.

New research from In-Stat reveals that the government vertical is among the strongest industry verticals for VoIP adoption. Based on In-Stats survey, 48% of respondents in government institutions report that VoIP is deployed in at least one location. The report also found that Hosted IP Communications is something the government and healthcare verticals are interested in deploying or have already deployed.

This is great news for Nortel CVAS because many government networks are hosted using Nortel CVAS TDM Centrex switches. And, these enterprises will be happy to know that our solution offers a gradual migration path to IP by delivering a network that supports a mix of TDM and IP lines in the same business group. This enables the enterprise to migrate to IP in a phased approach rather than having to completely rip and replace all of their equipment. We can also leverage the existing telephony and TDM equipment that the business has installed to deliver unified communication, which means the business is getting more out of what they've already paid for and installed.

Earlier today we issued a couple of announcements touting our industry-leadership in the Carrier VoIP space. One announcement points to recent data from Infonetics Research and Dell'Oro Group that name Nortel CVAS as the #1 global Carrier VoIP and Softswitch market leader for the fourth quarter of 2009. Infonetics also found that Nortel CVAS grew share in every sector of the VoIP market in 2009.

We also announced that Unified Communications magazine (a TMCNet publication) recently named Nortel CVAS' Adaptive UC solution as a recipient of its 2009 Product of the Year Award.

Late yesterday Nortel announced that it has completed the sale of the company's GSM/GSM-R Business to Ericsson and Kapisch. To read the press release, click here.

And so, we close off another chapter of the Nortel story.

You may have also noticed that the Ottawa Citizen captured a shot of the Nortel signs outside the Ottawa facility being changed to the new owners - Ciena, Avaya and Ericsson.

Earlier this week the CVAS team exhibited at VoiceCon, an enterprise-focused tradeshow that took place in Orlando. The traffic to our booth was better than expected considering this was the first year that the CVAS ("Carrier") team attended the event which has historically been a key venue for our Enterprise (now Avaya) team. We met with nearly 50 carriers, enterprise and channel partners at the show and also had an opportunity to talk to some key enterprise analysts and press.

With today's announcement that Ciena has completed the acquisition of Nortel's Optical and Carrier Ethernet businesses, my time at Nortel has come to an end. I, along with about 2,000 fellow employees, will officially become a Ciena employee at midnight tonight. So this will be my last post on Nortel Buzzboard. And while I'm very excited at the prospect of working at Ciena, I wanted to use this post to say goodbye.

The past 14 years that I've spent at Nortel have had their fair share of highs and lows. The friends and teammates that have been a part of everything we've done during that time have easily made the experience worthwhile. Many of those people have already moved on to new jobs, even new industries, but are still very much a part of what I remember about Nortel.

Nortel has today announced that it has completed the sale of its Optical Networking and Carrier Ethernet businesses to Ciena. You can see the Nortel press release here, and Ciena has also just issued a press release.

Per the Nortel release, Ciena paid an "all cash purchase price of approximately US$774 million, subject to a working capital adjustment currently estimated as a downward adjustment of approximately US$62 million."

As part of the deal, 2,000 Nortel employees are joining Ciena as of end of day March 19th, 2010, the effective date of the sale.

This past winter many workers across the country were unable to get to the office because of bad weather/snowstorms. Even here in Dallas, where we had record snowfall, workers were forced to stay off the roads and skip their daily commute. (Trust me - you do NOT want to be driving in Dallas when the roads are icy - many of the folks in this town do not know how to drive on that stuff!) And, even those workers that were able to drive in, were late due to traffic. All this time on the road and out of the office meant more voicemail and e-mail messages piled up at the office, missed meetings and business delays.

One way businesses can avoid this is with Unified Communications (UC) which allow people to work from practically any location and use all of their communication applications just like they would at the office. For example, with VoIP technology, a PC based softphone can be used on a worker's home PC and give them access to all of their office communications features. They can answer their office/business calls over their PC client, access voicemail, email, use presence, perform web collaboration, and much more.

We've had a few folks ask us why the Carrier VoIP and Application Solutions group would attend Mobile World Congress, what many refer to as a "wireless" tradeshow.

There are a couple of reasons. First, while the title of this show is "mobile" the fact of the matter is that service providers are now operating converged networks that include wireless, wireline, and mobile IP broadband access. With IP broadband they've enabled a whole new world of IP Communications and, as the leader in Carrier IP Communications, Nortel CVAS clearly will be a leader in delivering Mobile VoIP over the new 4G broadband access networks. So, we're at Mobile World Congress because we provide VoIP solutions for any broadband service provider, whether they're wireless, wireline cable.

This week Nortel CVAS is at the GSMA Mobile World Congress tradeshow in Barcelona, Spain to discuss Nortel's Carrier VoIP innovations and work to help leading carriers converge their wireline, wireless and cable networks to IP. Mobile World Congress is billed as the industry's pre-eminent forum to showcase broadband-enabled wireless and converged network technologies as well as the business solutions and services powered by broadband.

Nortel CVAS issued two announcements at the show.

In case you missed the news right before the holidays, Nortel announced that it has entered into a "stalking horse" asset sale agreement with GENBAND for the sale of Nortel's CVAS business. See the complete press release here

GENBAND is a worldwide supplier of next-generation IP gateways, session border controllers and fixed mobile convergence (FMC) security solutions. The proposed transaction with GENBAND provides for the transition of substantially all of Nortel's CVAS customer contracts. GENBAND will acquire substantially all of Nortel's CVAS assets, including softswitching, gateways and SIP applications and all patents and IP that are predominantly used in the CVAS business. GENBAND has teamed with one of its existing shareholders, One Equity Partners III, L.P. (OEP), to assist in financing the proposed purchase of Nortel's CVAS assets. OEP manages investments and commitments for JP Morgan Chase & Co. in private equity transactions.

Well, it's official - Nortel has completed the divestiture of its second major business unit. Avaya announced Friday that it has successfully completed its acquisition of Nortel Enterprise Solutions (NES). The move will boost Avaya's competitiveness globally by expanding its partner ecosystem and creating a broader product portfolio. And, approximately 6,000 Nortel employees are making the jump over to Avaya (myself included - so, regrettably, this will be my last BuzzBoard post).

On Monday Nortel officially announced the commercial availability of our 100G solution. However, our optical team has been working to get that 100G product to market for years, and that includes trials with service providers around the world.

Yesterday, we added a name to that list of successful trials with the announcement that Lightower had completed a successful trial of our 100G solution in their network.