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.

Back in March 2008, I wrote one of my first posts on this Buzzboard blog called How about a little "rational exuberance". On that day, Nortel had just unveiled our new 40G Optical solution to the world, and my post suggested that maybe it was time to get excited again about Nortel's optical business. Of course, many things have changed since that time and I think we can all agree that from a Nortel corporate level there hasn't been a lot to be "exuberant" about over the last year.

But one thing that hasn't changed during that time is Nortel's grip on leading edge optical technology that allows us to do things with optical networks that no other vendor can do. That was reinforced once again this week when we loudly announced that Nortel was the world's first to have a commercially available 100G solution for the market.

In case you missed the news earlier this week, three top industry analyst firms: Dell'Oro Group, Infonetics Research, and Synergy Research recently published reports that rank Nortel as the global leader in carrier VoIP, with the largest revenues in the carrier IP market for third quarter 2009. For complete details, see the press release here

Nortel has held the carrier VoIP leadership spot for the past 8 years.

In addition, Nortel also received Telecom Asia's Readers' Choice award and was named Asia's VoIP Vendor of the Year. See press release here

Big news today out of Canada on the Avaya-Nortel Enterprise deal... Avaya announced the Canadian Minister of Industry has approved its acquisition of Nortel Enterprise Solutions under the Investment Canada Act.

The Honourable Tony Clement, Canada's Minister of Industry, commented "I have approved the application by Avaya to acquire Nortel's Enterprise Solutions business because I am satisfied that the investment is likely to be of net benefit to Canada."

There has been quite a bit of activity from the corporate divestiture front at Nortel in the past few weeks, so just in case you missed it, I thought I would briefly summarize some of our recent announcements from Nortel CVAS.

Last week we announceda new agreement with Bell Aliant, to support their next-generation network across Atlantic Canada.

As part of the new agreement, Sigma Systems will supply OSS fulfillment solutions, including its Service Management Platform and Device Provisioning Manager, which enables service providers to easily auto-configure and provision business and residential end-user SIP devices and VoIP phone lines for its subscribers.

After a three day long auction that started Friday morning and didn't end until late Sunday night, Ciena has been named the winning bidder for Nortel's Optical Networking and Carrier Ethernet businesses (with NSN being the second bidder). Ciena's final bid came in at US$530 million in cash plus US$239 in convertible notes.

By winning the auction, Ciena consummates many of the deal parameters that were part of it's original stalking horse bid announced back on October 7th. Specifically, the agreement provides for the transfer of substantially all customers, product platforms, and a minimum of 2,000 employees* (representing more than 85% of the employee base).

For those of you tracking Nortel financials, we issued third quarter 09 earnings earlier today - see the news release here. Also of note, as announced last week, Nortel is no longer providing combined financial statements for its Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) subsidiaries currently under creditor protection. Instead, we are now presenting these entities using the equity method of accounting.

For those of you looking for an update on the sale of Nortel's Optical and Carrier Ethernet businesses, the below press release just crossed the wires. You can see the full release here.

============

Nortel Provides Update on Auction for the Sale of its Optical Networking and Carrier Ethernet Business

TORONTO, ONTARIO--(Marketwire - Nov. 13, 2009) - Nortel(1) Networks Corporation (OTCBB:NRTLQ) announced that in light of ongoing discussions with interested parties, it has decided to not hold the previously scheduled auction today in relation to the sale of its global Optical Networking and Carrier Ethernet businesses. Qualified bidders are now required to submit offers by November 17, 2009. The Company expects to provide a further update on the auction process and sale of these businesses next week.

Avaya and Nortel have received a couple of key regulatory approvals (see Reuters story here) for the proposed acquisition of Nortel's Enterprise business - namely, HSR Act and Canadian Competition Act approval.

For more details, check out today's post on Enterprise Technology - which includes some great videos (Avaya CEO Kevin Kennedy talks about the Nortel deal, and Avaya's keynote from VoiceCon last week).

Hey, for anyone who missed Wednesday's Enterprise webinar, the archived version is now available here. Or, for more detail, check out Matt's post on the Enterprise Technology blog.

For any of you looking for more info on Nortel's Enterprise solutions - including an overview on the planned Avaya acquisition - you might want to check out an Enterprise Solutions webinar we're hosting November 4.

David Downing, Nortel's General Manager for Communications Solutions, and IDC Research Director Abner Germanow will host a virtual roundtable to discuss the Avaya deal (to the extent we can at this point in the process), as well as talk shop on Nortel IT networking strategies and technologies. They'll be joined by customers to discuss recent deployments. To register for the event, click here.