Nortel Buzzboard

Every week on Friday or Saturday, I’ll do a quick post on the top 5 most read Nortel blog posts for the week.  This won’t just be a list of Buzzboard posts, but across all Nortel blogs hosted on nortel.com.

The goal is to give you a quick view to what the broad Nortel readership thought was interesting reading over the past week.  The list will be ordered by most views for the week.

So here’s this week’s list, which is heavy on posts about the Nortel video contest:

Buzzboard: You be the Ad Exec - Vote for the best video - not really a blog post, but this contest landing page got far and away the most views.
John Roese’s blog: …

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This week Nortel announced several new customer wins including significant services-led deals. If you follow this blog, you’ve heard me highlight multiple times the corporate focus (led by Mike Z) on turning Nortel into a software and services leader.

With this week’s customer wins, all of which relied heavily on consulting and other support services, I thought it was a great opportunity to get some insight directly from Jerry Boezel, who heads up channel strategy and marketing under Nortel Global Services President Dietmar Wendt. Below is Jerry’s guest post, as well as a Nortel video on services-powered businesses:

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Jerry Boezel, Vice President,Global Services Channel Strategy and Marketing for NortelAs a marketer, much of my time is spent talking with frontline sales teams to learn what works and what we need to focus on. It is very energizing to talk about things to come. I was in a meeting in Maidenhead, UK some time ago with several sales leaders from Europe to discuss customer opportunities for Nortel’s exciting new Secure Portable Office (SPO) solution - which was not announced at the time. It’s essentially your secure “office on a stick” that every road warrior will love. It allows secure access to corporate information and applications through a specially formatted USB key, and it is applicable to many industries.

One of the managers on my team was field-testing SPO. He said “SPO enhances teleworking. No need to carry the company laptop around when you bike to work (green and healthy) or commute on a bus. Often I use my personal PC from home - accessing Outlook, internal web pages and applications.”

Today’s businesses are shifting to networking-based solutions and integrating it into their existing business processes and infrastructure. Take, for example, the healthcare sector, an area of considerable focus for Nortel. Living in Europe and traveling the world, I can attest to the problems many countries are facing. They need high-quality but affordable healthcare. And healthcare institutions are keen to meet these needs despite costs rising.

This is where Nortel’s Global Services can help, working with hospitals, doctors’ offices and other medical facilities to evaluate and adopt new communications technologies, like SPO, to make the staff more efficient, manage costs, and improve customer care.

A good example is Liverpool Women’s Hospital in the UK, which is implementing SPO to manage complicated network log-ins, security and protection of sensitive private data for midwives. This allows them to focus their time and energy on delivering excellent in-home care for women and babies. Or look at Carolinas HealthCare System, the third largest public healthcare system in the USA. They are using Nortel VoIP and multimedia contact center solutions to help safely and securely speed delivery of high-quality, personalized patient care while managing their costs.

Both of these examples demonstrate the importance of needs assessment, consulting, design, integration, security, solution training and other services Nortel offers from its Global Services portfolio to help healthcare institutions create and implement complete hardware and software solutions that uniquely address their needs.

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In the U.S. and Canada we have a long weekend coming up with a Monday holiday, which also means a drop in readership the Friday before (which is today).  So we’ll pick up the next post for this contest on Tuesday after the holiday break.

If you haven’t been following contest, now is a great chance to catch-up.  The easiest way it to go to the contest home page.  You can also see all the Buzzboard posts related to the contest here.

Next week we’ll unveil the new Nortel commercial soon to be aired on CNN.  I’m also hoping to show a few of the employee-created videos that didn’t make the voting cut.  And of course, the most important thing …

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Two days and two employee-created, “homemade” videos on energy efficiency.  In case you missed our previous posts on this contest, here’s the post on the first video - the Nortel Robot.  And here’s the post on the second video - Socks and Sandals.  For a quick summary of the overall campaign/contest, visit the contest home page.

Both videos so far have been great in my opinion, though entirely different in how they try to get the energy efficiency message across.  Today I have the third and final employee-created video, and it also takes a unique angle in getting the message across — and who doesn’t like cute babies, right?

In the U.S. and Canada we have a long weekend …

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A few days ago I pointed to an exclusive article from Telephony Magazine that highlighted an LTE industry first between Nortel and LG Electronics.  Today, Nortel issued an official press release on the accomplishment, which you can see here.

One particular paragraph from the release provides some additional technical details of the demo:
The LTE demonstration was conducted over a network consisting of multiple cell sites and sectors served by Nortel’s eNodeB LTE base station and ATCA-based Access Gateway. The interoperability between Nortel’s network and the device from LG Electronics is based on 3GPP Release 8 Standard. As the first in the world to reach this milestone, Nortel is leading the way to making …

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Yesterday here on Buzzboard, we launched a new video contest using “homemade” employee-created videos that highlighted the energy efficiency benefits of Nortel’s products.  The first video being this Nortel Robot video.  The timing and appropriateness of these videos was questioned by a few people.  Even Mark Evans (who’s a fan of our social media activities) wondered what was up.

Shouldn’t Nortel be focused on bigger “business challenges” instead of posting employee videos? My response to that question: Focusing on business challenges is exactly what we are doing.

Energy efficiency is a hot button for enterprises today, and it will likely remain one.  The economics of energy have changed, and that has changed the decision-making process of enterprises (…

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There is no doubt that laptops have revolutionized business.  Their performance and low price mean that almost any business can afford to give their mobile employees a way to stay better connected when traveling.

There are times, however, when even a laptop it too bulky, when you don’t have your laptop but unexpectedly need to connect, or when laptops are shared among a group of users.

Nortel today announced Secure Portable Office (SPO), a new solution that allows mobile workes to securely access their corporate networks using a specially formatted USB key that you can use with any Windows PC.  In other words, an office-on-a-stick.  You can see the press release here, and …

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Telephony magazine looks to have an exclusive story today with this article by Kevin Fitchard about a Nortel industry first.  Kevin talked to Danny Locklear, VP of marketing for Nortel carrier networks, about Nortel’s completion of the industry’s first live air handoff of an LTE data call between cell stations.

In the article, Danny says that Nortel completed handoffs between cell stations at speeds as high as 100 kilometers per hour.  The feat was achieved using prototype Nortel LTE radio and network gear and prototype handsets early LTE mobile devices from LG Electronics.  An HD video stream was used during the call handoff testing.

Of course, Nortel’s been doing prior LTE testing to get to this point …

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We’re going to have some fun on Buzzboard this week and next, and it requires a little participation by you.  We recently put a call out to all Nortel employees, asking them to create their own “homemade” videos that highlight Nortel’s green and energy efficiency benefits.  The response was tremendous, and so were the videos.

We asked people to create these completely on their own, in their spare time, with absolutely no help (or budget) — so I wasn’t expecting much by way of quality. Boy was I wrong.  We have some creative and talented people at Nortel for sure, and you’re going to get to see their work. Starting today through Thursday, I’m going to post one employee-created video each …

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Yesterday I highlighted Nortel’s new deal with the New York Mets new Citi Field baseball stadium with a post entitled “Nortel is a Mets fan.”  But Nortel also announced a deal to build the network for the Vancouver Canucks’ hockey stadium.

Can I risk claiming the Canucks as Nortel’s favorite hockey team?  While the lack of much passion for the Toronto Blue Jays (Canada’s only baseball team) made it relatively easy to post the Mets headline, there are quite a few Nortel employees passionate about their Ottawa Senators (including my boss).  And those who aren’t Sens fans are likely Toronto Maple Leafs fans.

That said, what Nortel is doing with General …

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