It's now official - the Nortel/Avaya deal has closed. As of today, Avaya has expanded its portfolio, enlarged its customer base and broadened its global reach. I think Kevin Kennedy's quote best summarizes the benefits that Nortel brings to Avaya:

"By combining our complementary technology portfolios, deep industry specific domain expertise, sales channels and customer bases, the new Avaya will redefine business communications and help customers to reduce costs, simplify operations and increase their business agility." In other words, the deal makes both organizations and their customers exponentially better off. Read the full Avaya press release here.

See what Avaya has to say about the status of the deal and the value it places on Nortel's people, technology and customer base by watching this short video clip. You'll hear Mohamad Ali, Avaya's Senior Vice President of Corporate Development talk about the acquisition, why Avaya was willing to "go the distance" during the auction and how the Nortel and Avaya teams are working extensively to ensure that the new organization will be operational from day one.

We're always looking for new ways to interact with customers - that's just good business. And, we're always tinkering with new technologies. I mean, Nortel was basically built on innovation. So, while it may have slipped under the radar last week, we made a cool little announcement that shows a bit of both.

Basically, we're enabling organizations to trial and evaluate our communications portfolio over the Internet by using the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud technology (Amazon EC2). This provides on-demand access to a broad range of Nortel technologies, including Unified Communications, Contact Center solutions and our Interactive Communications Portal and Agile Communication Environment. And, it allows prospective customers to test out these technologies in a simple, low-cost and risk-free environment. Plus, since it's accessible from an information rich portal , it's a community-oriented site that also serves as a knowledge base for the developer community - it features discussion forums, product documentation, sample applications, source code, tutorials, podcasts, white papers and other shared info.

With the recent emphasis on acquisitions, it has been easy for some to forget that Nortel is still very much focused on closing deals. Nortel's Enterprise Solutions has recently signed a bunch of new contracts across multiple regions and verticals - covering a range of technologies including Unified Communications (UC), Ethernet Routing Switches, contact center solutions and virtual collaboration environments. In a year that has been described as "challenging" - to put it mildly - we are very proud of the fact that Nortel is still seen as a company that customers trust.

You can learn more about these deals by checking out recent press releases on new contracts in the Caribbean and Latin America and public sector wins across the Asia Pacific region.

Avaya and Nortel have received a couple of key regulatory approvals (see Reuters story here) for the proposed sale of Nortel's Enterprise business.

As Avaya announced earlier today, we were notified by the U.S. Department of Justice of early termination of the antitrust waiting period under the Hart-Scott-Rodino (HSR) act. We also received regulatory clearance from the Canadian Competition Bureau. While finalization of the deal still remains subsequent to further regulatory review, these are two major milestones reached by our integration team as we work toward our expected close in December.

As I mentioned earlier this week, we held a webcast yesterday to provide more info on Nortel's Enterprise solutions including an overview on the planned Avaya acquisition. I guess it's not too surprising, given all the buzz around the Avaya deal, but the webcast shattered Nortel's record for the highest number of attendees for an online webinar event with over 2300 participants.

In case you missed it, the archived version is now available here.

Highlights from the event include:

David Downing, Nortel's General Manager for Communications Solutions, and IDC Research Director Abner Germanow will be hosting an interactive web event on November 4th to discuss the planned acquisition of Nortel by Avaya, as well as IT networking strategies and technology. To register for the event, click here.

In addition to talking technology, we'll hear from several Nortel Enterprise customers on their recent deployments and why they chose Nortel. And, we'll do our best to try to answer questions about the planned Avaya deal - at least to the extent that we can at this point in the process. The event will conclude with a Q&A session.

Ok, ok, i know it's been several months since we've posted an update to this blog. In our defense, we've had a lot going on with the Avaya deal. That said, we're trying to get back up to speed in providng content on Enterprise events, technology, news - and of course - the planned sale of Nortel's Enterprise biz to Avaya.

So, to provide a few more typing fingers, Matt Oshida and I are joinning Phil Edholm as contributors to Enterprise Technology - watch for new content coming very soon...

Last week was an exciting time at Global Connect. After an opening reception Sunday night hosted by Mike Z, the sessions kicked off Monday morning with a keynote featuring Mike Z, Joel Hackney and yours truly. Joel talked about the overall vision and strategy for the enterprise business, while I focused on how our products and solutions are changing the way our customers do business. The session was well received and reflects the continuing value that Nortel is delivering to our customers.

I am flying this weekend to the International Nortel Networks Users Association(INNUA) Global Connect event in Pittsburgh. Global Connect starts this weekend and continues through Wednesday. it is a great opportunity to immerse into the Nortel products, communications, UC, and networking.

While at the event I will be doing some specific sessions and talking with a large number of customers. Global Connect includes the Insight100 group focused to the SL100/CS2100 large systems as well as the Nortel Enterprise technology Forum (NETF), an event that focuses to the technical implementation issues that architects face in engineering large scale systems.

In the last installment of the series on the dimensions of communications the topic was sensory interfaces, but we focused on audio. In this post we will focus on the visual aspects, specifically real time video.

I wanted to put in a quick post to let everyone who follows this blog know that the Nortel Technical Journalfor for thefirst half 2009 has been released and is on-line. That is right, it is ON-LINE only...with the Nortel focus to being a green supplier and a investing in protecting the environment we made the decision to transform the NTJ into an on-line magazine that we will update every 6 months or so. This issue has articles about the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Network, Innovation both inside the company and with the custoemr, and critical wireless technology.

Please chech out the 1st Half 2009 Nortel Technical Journal HERE

An area of interest for me recently has been how the iPhone and iPod can be used as part of integrating communications in the enterprise. The iPhone has some serious limitations as the design of the APIs limits the capability of running communications applications when the cellular phone is operating and does not allow background applications from third parties (this is primarily for battery usage reasons as I understand). This makes it difficult to have an application that receives interaction requests as it is only available if it is the active app (so you cannot be listening to your music and receive a call). The capability to remotely interrupt and start an applicaiton has relatively large time windows, so this becomes impractical.

So for the iPhone, the best way to integrate seems to be through the cellular phone with control through the browser.

I had an opportunity to present a view of the transformation in networking that are coming to the technical conference at National Semiconductor this week.   It was an interesting opportunity and led to a number of discussions.

One question I get quite frequently is how Nortel is using Nortel technology and products in our business.  I am pleased to announce that Steve Bandrowczak, Nortel CIO, and his team have put together a Nortel on Nortel website on the Nortel.com website that discusses how they are using Nortel products to deliver world class IT while reducing overall cost significantly.