Nortel Buzzboard

As Joel Hackney mentioned in his previous guest blog post, today Nortel issued a release to highlight the move by enterprises to Nortel’s enterprise data solutions.

What was a little easy to miss in the news, however, was a second document (PDF) that literally voices the individual thoughts of 50 Nortel data customers. As a former PR guy, I am nothing short of amazed at the ability to get 50 customers’ individual quotes into a single document.

The most evident common theme across the quotes was around network reliability and uptime - with multiple references to Nortel SMLT and “unique architectures.” A great price-to-performance ratio, trust in Nortel, and the willingness to partner with the customer were other common themes.

While all 50 quotes provide their own interesting angle, some of you busy bodies out there might not be willing to sit down and read through the entire 13 page document. So in my never-ending effort to “add value” - here is my own personal top 10 list:

10 ) “With Nortel I can spend the same amount, or less, but get better performance on a network that is easier to manage and maintain. Nortel is definitely the best bang for the buck.” — Domenic Carmona, Director of Information Technology, Dallas W-Victory Hotel

9 ) “When evaluating the secure routers head-to-head, we not only saw tremendous improvements in application response times, the Nortel solution also didn’t require an upgrade in bandwidth at each of our sites.” — Don Peterson, Manager of Network Engineering, Cambridge Health Alliance

8 ) “Nortel is the best kept secret in Enterprise data networks. We were surprised at how easy it was to upgrade to VoIP. We trust Nortel to deliver.” — Ken Woo, Assistant Director, Ryerson University

7 ) “Sierra Atlantic is expanding in India and we were looking to deploy a state-of-the-art data network which would cater to our present needs as well as provide us the backbone for our future applications. We chose a Nortel data network solution after a stringent competitive technical evaluation that went on for four months. The Nortel solution proved to be the most resilient, delivered superior performance, and was the most energy efficient. The support competency and commitments were far above any competition.” — Ram Kumar, Director-IT, Sierra Atlantic

6 ) “We chose a Nortel data solution due to its excellent reliability. We saw 100 percent uptime last year in running a combination of dual ERS 8600’s with SMLT, along with sub-second failover across our Optical Metro 3500 SONET network.” — Charles Mahoney, Network Manager, County of Allegheny

5 ) “Quite frankly, we were dead set on another solution, but we listened to Nortel and we were very pleased with what they were able to provide. We were pleasantly surprised with all the capability we’re getting for the dollars we’re spending. We’re looking at a two-year ROI; we can pretty much take that to the bank.” — Phillip Hagemann, CIO, Fred Weber, Inc.

4 ) “With Nortel Ethernet Switches we have gone from zero reliability to 100 percent and the Nortel wireless architecture we chose provided 1.5 times more functionality at a lower cost than the competition.” — Christine Stoffel, Vice President of IT and Strategic Operations, Phoenix Coyotes and Jobing.com

3 ) “We were able to add wireless Voice-over-IP phones to our existing PBX without having to go out and create a new standalone system… It was seamless.” — Dennis Young, Senior Network Administrator, BayCrest Hospital

2 ) “We have ‘high-level, high need’ clients that choose to come to FILMPORT because our advanced capabilities meet their requirements. We didn’t want a typical communications network. We needed a technical partner that recognized the current and, more importantly, the future needs of FILMPORT and our clients. High availability, zero down time - ‘5×9s’ was not good enough.” — Andy Sykes, VP Business Development, Toronto Filmport Studios

1 ) “When we really started to look under the hood - down to the details of what the backplanes of switches looked like and how many packets per second they could handle - we realized that the other vendor we were looking at had a really good marketing team, but the bottom line was that their product was inferior to Nortel’s.” — David Nehra, Vice President and CIO, Motor•City Casino Hotel

Did I miss one you liked? Let me know.