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).
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."
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).
Last week was a big one for our MEN business, as Nortel announced asset sale agreements for the proposed sale of our Optical and Carrier Ethernet businesses to Ciena. As with the various other businesses Nortel is in the process of selling, this sale to Ciena is subject to a competitive bidding process, with Ciena now identified as the "stalking horse".
One of the most interesting parts of the optical business that Ciena bid for is, of course, Nortel's 40G/100G technology. And it turns out that quite a few others like the technology, too, according to a new report from analyst firm Infonetics.
Infonetics has a new global optical survey that they are promoting here with the headline of "Carriers rank Nortel as top 40G/100G technology leader in optical equipment vendor survey". The survey polled purchase decision-makers at carriers in EMEA, North America, and Asia Pacific about optical transmission and switching equipment vendors. According to the highlights of the survey, in an open-ended question about 40G and 100G technology leaders, most service providers named Nortel as the top vendor.
Over on fibresystems.org, Pauline Rigby has an article about the timing of the 40G optical market versus the 100G market. She quotes multiple industry analysts in the story, and gets a general consensus from them that while some vendors may have 100G solutions available by the end of this year (that would include Nortel MEN by the way) or 2010, they don't expect sales of 100G to carriers to fully ramp up until several years later.
Here's one excerpt from the article:
"First deployments (of 100G) will definitely be in 2012, as some equipment will be available by end of this year, and some carriers will deploy it just to be 'first'," said Eve Griliches, program director for IDC's telecoms research. "But my guess is that real volume deployment will be in a third generation development of 100G, which will not be in 2012, but a year or two after that."
Nortel was recognized along with other marketing/brand giants like Apple, Converse, McDonalds & Coca-Cola - see the complete list of 2009 Effie trophy winners here.
Interesting article in BizWeek - Meet Cisco, the Consumer Company... As a loyal Nortel employee, I cringe whenever I watch one of my favorite TV shows, FOX's 24, because it's already drenched with Cisco product placements. If Cisco really presses into the consumer space, how long until we start seeing Cisco ads during episodes of House and American Idol?
No doubt, Cisco dominates the enterprise routing/switching space. But, do they risk loosing focus on their bread & butter business by pushing into the polar opposite - consumer networking? Ok, ok, maybe that's just sour grapes on my part. But I just can't stand Cisco commercials during my beloved Dallas Cowboy games... Lord please.
So come on, who isn't put out with that annoying phone call that always comes when you're totally engaged in a movie, or glued to the final seconds of a Final Four game?
Well, this week at The Cable Show in Washington, we launched a new product you couch potatoes may want to keep an eye on. Nortel's CM9520 product basically enables you to take - or decline - phone calls, instant messages or even picture messages directly through your TV set, using... wait for it... YES, your TV remote control!
A few quick hits from CTIA which kicked off today in Las Vegas:
The handset guys are drawing the biggest crowds - no surprise - people always want to check out latest & greatest gizmos from the likes of Blackberry, Kyocera and of course, our partner, LG (forgive the obvious plug). From an instructure perspective, LTE remains the hot topic - and was by far the busiest part of our booth today (see pictures from the showroom floor below).
Today I came across an interesting new video on YouTube that gives a visual walking tour of the Lenovo eLounge. The eLounge is, of course, built upon the Nortel web.alive platform.
And a shout out goes to Skribe Forti of Skribe Productions, who created this very well-produced video.
While Bo reports in live from the OFC/NFOEC optical conference, we're also gearing up for a few other big shows next week. So, in advance of one of the industry's top Enterprise shows, VoiceCon in Orlando, we announced today new additions to our Unified Communications portfolio, including a new software release for Nortel's Communication Server 1000 (that's our cornerstone piece of gear for installing UC for larger enterprises).
And, we spotlighted a list of UC customers, including the cities of Langford (British Columbia) and Orlanda (Florida), the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering (Boston area) and the Hospice of Palm Beach - all of which are now using Nortel UC to better manage communications and boost productivity. See the news release here.
Some good news yesterday for Nortel, as industry analyst firm Infonetics issued the fourth quarter (4Q08) edition of its Service Provider VoIP Equipment and Subscribers report. In this press release highlighting some of the findings in the report, Infonetics says "Nortel was the big winner for the quarter, increasing softswitch and trunk media gateway revenue and gaining share in both categories."
It wasn't all rosy news though, as Infonetics estimates that the overall carrier VoIP market was down 6% in 2008 as growth "stalled" due to a variety of factors. For 4Q08, worldwide revenues were up 4% to $849 million. The report also highlights that the number of residential and SOHO VoIP subscribers has grown to 107 million.
Nortel Buzzboard Categories
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). 
