Nortel Buzzboard

When Nortel CTO John Roese speaks, people listen. Not only is he a brilliant guy, but he also holds the reigns to Nortel’s approximately $1.7 billion in annual R&D spend.

This Spring, Roese has already been busy talking up the accomplishments Nortel’s R&D organization has made, and where we are going.

Yesterday on his blog, Roese provided some additional color and detail on his R&D focus going forward. The post is centered on a recent Nortel Technical Conference — an internal Nortel R&D event last month in Orlando that brought together 300 of Nortel’s brightest R&D minds. But since the purpose of the conference is to focus Nortel’s R&D experts on what Nortel can deliver for our customers, it provides some good insight into areas that Roese will have Nortel’s R&D engine working on.

In his post, Roese says that “Our biggest opportunity lies in the creation of new applications and the communications-enablement of existing IT applications.”

Indeed, this is focus on the software and applications side of things is something he and Nortel CEO Mike Z have been reinforcing for some time now. John’s post, however, provides some color on how he expects Nortel to make progress there. He also provides an interesting list of examples of applications being developed.

One application he mentions is an “Emergency Response Solution” that better brings together the technology and people needed for emergency situations, ultimately saving time and lives. This one caught my eye, because a Nortel demo of it was on display at Global Connect last month. I even took a little video of the demo in action, which you can see below (note - click through to YouTube to see the video with annotations added).