Nortel Buzzboard

The phrase of the day is “hosted unified communications.” That’s what we announced this morning at NXTcomm08 with Microsoft and with IBM.

What is hosted UC? An easier way for SMBs to get their hands on features like presence, unified messaging, multimedia conferencing and collaboration. SMBs can have carriers host their UC systems for them without buying, installing, managing and maintaining an in-house system. To borrow a recent Apple tagline, it’s like UC “for the rest of us.”

And hosted UC caters to roughly 90% of existing desktop environments.

Hosted UC ties our Communications Server (CS) 2000 with Microsoft’s solution for Hosted Messaging and Collaboration Version 4.5 — which includes Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 and …

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Didn’t the whole industry just get back from Las Vegas…several times? First CTIA Wireless, then Interop, now NXTcomm08. NXTcomm08 is of course the reincarnation of SuperComm, and is mainly focused on the carrier and service provider side of things.

And just like with previous shows, here on Buzzboard we’ll keep you in the loop on that Nortel has going at the event. I have a suspicion that Nortel will be announcing some news at the show, and we’ll cover that. We will also hopefully bring you some pictures and video from the booth.

If you happen to be headed out to NXTcomm, here’s a quick summary of what you can …

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There were a ton of articles that came out from yesterday’s news. Here’s my list of the more insightful ones:

Reuters has a nice summary of the news with quotes from the IR day event and several analysts, as does the Globe & Mail.
Telephony did a nice feature on the LTE/WiMAX news that included an interview with Scott Wickware.
Light Reading provided probably the most in-depth coverage of the Carrier Ethernet win with Verizon.
Barron’s debated which piece of Nortel news was responsible for the stock price increase.
The LTE vs. WiMAX debate raged on, with Network World talking about what it means to Nortel, and Tech Observer talking about what it means to the industry.
Total …

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One of yesterday’s big announcements was the news that Verizon had chosen Nortel as a supplier for its next-generation metro network backbone. While the 4G/WiMAX/LTE news got more media coverage, some suggest it’s really this big win with Verizon that is fueling some of the “excitement” about Nortel.

The actual press release didn’t get into a lot of detail on the win, so some of the media coverage and spokesperson comments fill out some of the story a little more. Light Reading covered the story and talked to Philippe Morin, Nortel’s president of Metro Ethernet Networks. In the article, Philippe highlights how Verizon choosing PBB over MPLS is a big endorsement since “the biggest …

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Scott Wickware, new GM for Nortel’s WiMAX businessYesterday was a big news day for Nortel, so let’s start sorting through the details of some of it and what the news means for Nortel’s direction.

The item that got the most attention yesterday was Nortel’s news in the 4G wireless space. Nortel announced a change in R&D direction here, shifting it’s main R&D efforts to 4G LTE to address that market’s accelerating time schedule. At the same time Nortel announced a strategic WiMAX agreement with Alvarion where they will become Nortel’s supplier for mobile WiMAX base stations as part of an end-to-end WiMAX solution.

[UPDATED: Watch …

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A quick note here about a new piece of news from this morning that I found interesting. Today Nortel issued this press release about how Montreal’s Santa Cabrini Hospital is deploying a unified communications solution — one that is supposed to be the first to provide wireless voice, data and patient monitoring services hospital-wide over a single common “clinical-grade” network.

The hospital will also allow staff to use the network for their own personal devices to access clinical applications from the patient’s bedside.While the release talks about all the “official” uses for the network - support for wireless electrocardiogram monitors …

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I’m still working through all the media coverage from today’s Nortel news. I’ll be spending most of tomorrow focusing on going through the news, and highlighting the more interesting coverage.

Until then, I thought one of today’s articles was of particular interest. This article in Telephony talks about Nortel’s move to focus it’s future R&D resources on 4G LTE, and how the new relationship with Alvarion will help Nortel still play in the WiMAX market.

New GM of WiMAX solutions Scott Wickware is interviewed, and suggests that the Alvarion relationship began through a little matchmaking from one of Nortel’s customers:

“One notable customer suggested we get together with Alvarion,” Wickware said. “They felt …

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Pavi Binning, Nortel’s CFO, was next up on the agenda. Here are some notes from his presentation:

Pavi said that Nortel’s goal was to reduce IT costs by 10% in 2008 and finance costs by 25% in 2008
He also showed the below chart, which provided a view of how Nortel’s revenues will evolve from today to 2011, and the CARGs for each business unit needed to achieve those goals.

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Here are a couple of notes from Lauren Flaherty’s speech. Lauren is our chief marketing officer.

One item that Lauren talked about was the changing tone of Nortel’s media coverage over the last few years. Nortel’s history of accounting and other problems have been increasingly NOT part of media coverage, as the first slide below shows.
Lauren also showed a chart that gave a preview of some enhancements coming late this year to nortel.com. The second pic below is a mock-up of the new site.
Lauren also talked about the increasing number of customers that are willing to “go public” as Nortel customers through case studies, advertising, etc. She highlighted 200 new public case studies, video testimonials, …

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After lunch Dennis Carey and Joe Flanagan did a tag-team presentation that focused on various Nortel Operations topics. Dennis Carey is Nortel’s Executive VP of Corporate Operations, while Joe Flanagan is Nortel’s senior VP of Global Operations.

Here are my notes from their session:

Dennis Carey started things off. He provided an update and view on Nortel’s efforts to cut $1.5 billion in costs over three years. See that slide below which breaks these efforts down across various areas of the business
Another item he talked about a lot was Lean Six Sigma. He put up the following chart that is new to me, and really details the results of how Nortel’s Six Sigma program is working …

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