Nortel Buzzboard

Scott Wickware, VP of Marketing and Strategy for Nortel’s Carrier Networks businessThis week is CTIA Wireless 2008, one of the industry’s biggest wireless events of the year. Nortel will be participating of course - with a booth, a good amount of news, and various session speakers.

One of those Nortel speakers will be Scott Wickware, VP of Marketing and Strategy for Nortel’s Carrier Networks business. A 16-year veteran of Nortel, Scott is responsible for charting the overall business and go-to-market strategy for Nortel’s largest business, with responsibilities for all aspects of commercial, product and strategic marketing. He also sits on the Board of Directors of both CTIA and the Wireless Foundation.

In advance of CTIA, I asked Scott a few questions on Nortel’s wireless strategy, the evolution of our portfolio, and his thoughts on the direction the wireless industry is going:

The industry increasingly sees CDMA as a declining market. Considering Nortel’s leadership in this space, where do you see CDMA demand headed, and how long can Nortel realistically rely on CDMA as a money-making market?

Today’s telecom infrastructure market is going through a bit of a rough patch at the moment brought on by the global economic conditions, particularly in the US. Having said that, we continue to see strength in many segments of the market with operators investing in expansions and upgrades of today’s current technologies. Nortel has done reasonably well in this environment by growing many of our businesses in markets that are essentially flattish.

As an example, Nortel has shown great strength in CDMA over the past year by acquiring an incremental 2% in market share. We continue to focus in 2008 around improving the quality of our products and customer relationships and selectively growing our market share in CDMA and other technologies. At the same time, we’re beginning to see carriers committing to 4G and we expect commercial deployments starting in 2010. It is essential that Nortel is early to market with a strong portfolio of solutions to play a significant role in next generation mobility to ensure to ensure that we successfully transition our customer base and our own revue from today’s existing technologies.

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One recent news item that I didn’t get to talk about in the last few weeks with all the other news about 40 gig and VoiceCon (as well as a week of vacation) was the joint news that Nortel announced a few weeks ago with Microsoft.  This area is particularly close to my heart as I have personally supported this alliance for the last year and half.

In our joint release with Microsoft, we announced that four new OCS-based solutions from our Innovative Communications Alliance were now generally available.  In total, Nortel and Microsoft have now brought 10 solutions to market related to the alliance.  The alliance now has over 600 wins, and we highlighted 5 new OCS-based joint customers in the release.

Earlier today I attended an internal Q&A session in Richardson for Nortel employees hosted by Ruchi Prasad.  Ruchi is Nortel’s VP and GM of the Innovative Communications Alliance.  She answered various questions about the alliance’s progress, our solutions, the competition, etc.

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Last night CBC in Canada had a great video piece on the coming Internet traffic jam.  About halfway in Nortel’s Philippe Morin is interviewed with his insight.  Again this topic ties back into Nortel’s recent 40 gig news.  Also included is a great shot of Nortel’s telepresence solution if you haven’t seen it before.

The best line in the entire clip has to be the closing, when a teenager is asked what she would do if the Internet were to slow down considerably:
“I would just get frustrated and not want to spend my time on the computer, and maybe do something useful.”
The complete piece is below (about 3 minutes long).

UPDATE: Here’s a link to another …

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There’s been quite a bit of media coverage on Nortel over the last few days so I figured I’d summarize it with links to some of the more interesting articles.

Yesterday’s wireless news about Nortel wins with BSNL, U.S Cellular and Sky Link generated a lot of interest, including articles in Computerworld, Globe & Mail, Reuters, and the Ottawa Citizen.

Outside of the wireless news coverage, there have been a couple of other articles of interest:

Philippe Morin, president of Metro Ethernet Networks for Nortel, was interviewed by the Canadian Press for an article here on how the future move to online HD video will put increasing pressure on an already strained Internet backbone.  …

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One of the new wireless wins that I mentioned in my previous post was a $100 million contract to provide GSM wireless infrastructure to BSNL in India. 

While a $100 million contract is always good news, this particular contract has an interesting history to it.    Nortel previously won a GSM deployment with BSNL at the end of 2004.  At the time of the announcement, Nortel highlighted that we would lose money on the deal, but that it was “an important strategic investment” for Nortel to establish a footprint in India’s fast-growing market.

Over the next year, that loss increased as implementation costs came in higher than expected.  By the end of 2005, Nortel was generally being criticized all around for taking such a …

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Next week is another big wireless trade show, CTIA Wireless 2008 in Las Vegas.  As part of the ramp-up for that event, Nortel today issued several press releases on new wireless contract wins.

This morning Nortel announced a new 5-year CDMA contract with U.S. Cellular, the nations 6th largest mobile operator with over 6 million customers.   U.S. Cellular has been a Nortel wireless customer since the mid-1980s, and has been deploying Nortel CDMA equipment since 2002 (with past announcements here and here).  In addition to equipment, the contract also includes emergency technical support, spares management, software patch management, performance monitoring and other services from Nortel’s Global Services portfolio.

Also today, Nortel …

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Nortel talks a lot about Hyperconnectivity…enough that we bought the domain name.  When you have a few minutes, take a look at Hyperconnectivity.com.  While Nortel has had this site live for a while, we recently re-launched it with completely new content.

The most notable change in the site is a new blog designed to be an unbiased and opinionated take on the business of Hyperconnectivity.  I know what you’re thinking…an “unbiased” Nortel-sponsored blog, sure.

To accomplish the unbiased part, the site leans on two independent bloggers to drive the discussion: Alex Lewis and Carlo Longino.  Alex is an enterprise IT consultant with 15 years industry experience.  He also has a Microsoft-focused blog on Network World.  Carlo is an experienced writer and analyst who …

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No Jitter’s Matt Brunk wrote a short post about his meeting with Nortel’s Tony Leger at VoiceCon. Having seen our Nortel Energy Efficiency Calculator demo at the show, Matt explains why he thinks Nortel “gets” being green.

The fact that our switching equipment was up to 50% more energy efficient than Cisco’s may have had something to do with it.

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Something that we’re very proud of but don’t often talk about at Nortel are our corporate citizenship initiatives. Nortel LearniT, our key philanthropic program, announced yesterday that it will partner with Curriki, a non-profit founded by Sun Microsystems, to deliver one of the world’s largest, free online sources of educational materials.

Both organizations focus on expanding learning in the classroom — on making technology an integral part of learning and the learning process, and providing teachers with free curricula and online resources. Today’s alliance will bring Curriki’s curriculum publishing platform together with Nortel LearniT’s science, technology, engineering and mathematics teacher training program.

How does this help teachers? Among other things, this alliance makes it easier for them to go …

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This is VoiceCon week, and as expected unified communications is the hot topic. Vendors across the industry are trumpeting their UC features, solutions and benefits to anyone who will listen.Nortel has of course been talking about UC for quite a while, most visibly through our Innovative Communications Alliance with Microsoft. And this week is no different for us, with multiple UC announcements that we issued around the show: True unified communications doesn’t just work in an office or on your desk phone…mobility is key. This week Nortel unveiled a host of new Mobility for UC features and solutions. The goal is not just to extend the functionality of your office phone …

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