Nortel Buzzboard

Nortel’s internal IT network has long been a proving ground for technologies that Nortel sells to enterprises and service providers around the world.  This philosophy of “Nortel on Nortel” has created a best-in-class IT network that increases employee productivity and saves the company millions.  Here are just a few data points:

• Unified Communications: Nortel has implemented UC and realized over $12 million in annual savings with a 10-month ROI.
• Green: By having one-third fewer data center rooms and 1,800 fewer servers, Nortel avoided an estimated 15M kWh of energy valued at approximately $530K annually.
• VoIP: Nortel is consolidating its voice infrastructure from a highly distributed to a centralized architecture to improve operational efficiency and save $4.5 million in operating expenses.
• Mobility: Nortel IT supports a variety of mobility solutions based on job requirements that result in a 15% increase in employee productivity and allowing 90% of Nortel to access corporate applications somewhere remotely.

This and many other success stories have prompted Nortel to launch a new “Nortel on Nortel” program designed to share with enterprise CIOs the real-world experiences of operating a global enterprise network.

Nortel CIO Steve BandrowczakNortel CIO Steve Bandrowczak is not your typical CIO.  He has stated several times that he spends 40% of his time talking to Nortel customers and industry CIOs, as peer interaction is the best way he’s found to learn.  In this recent guest post in John Roese’s blog, Steve cited that peer-to-peer learning experience at the catalyst for creating the Nortel on Nortel program.

As part of the process of sharing Nortel’s internal IT experiences, 20+ Nortel on Nortel case studies have been posted online for everything from spam filtering (Nortel blocks as many as 1.1 million spam emails a day) to integration with Microsoft OCS to WLAN guest access.  Nortel also has a webcast scheduled for October 30th to talk about results and lessons learned from internal IT deployments.

Also available as part of the program are multiple video interviews with Steve Bandrowczak, best practices documents, and even several internal Nortel-developed IT tools that are now being made available publicly.

Go visit the Nortel on Nortel program home page.  If you are a CIO or enterprise IT manager, let us know what you think.  What do you like, what is missing?  Would an online forum that allows better discussion and interaction be helpful?