Nortel Buzzboard

The official Nortel news blog

Category Archive: Commentary

Stuffing the ballot box

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Which is your favorite energy efficiency video?

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It’s been over a decade since I last studied Statistics in college, but I still remember a few things from it (no matter how much I’d like to forget everything about that class).  One thing I know, is that a sample size of 400+ people for a survey is considered “statistically relevant.”

So yesterday morning when I checked out the voting count for the video contest, I thought we had a pretty clear winner.  The Nortel “Piles” commercial had a comfortable lead atop the voting, with the employee-created “sock …

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Video contest: Two new Nortel commercials

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Which is your favorite energy efficiency video?

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Last week here on Buzzboard, we showed you three employee-created, “homemade” videos that all used unique ways to get across Nortel’s energy efficiency message.  If you didn’t get to see any of the employee videos, you can find them below.

Today you get to see two brand new, professionally created commercials that Nortel has started airing on CNN.  Like the employee-created videos, these new Nortel commercials focus on energy efficiency — but they do it in a very direct way that I think creates a tremendous impact to the viewer.

There are two …

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Top 5 Nortel blog posts of the week

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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Guest Post: Jerry Boezel of Nortel Global Services

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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Catch-up on the Nortel video contest

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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Day 3 of the video contest

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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Day 2 of the video contest - and why it matters

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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Video: The Nortel Robot

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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Top 5 Nortel blog posts of the week

Friday I unveiled our new polling feature - today I’m unveiling a new recurring blog post.  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:

John Roese’s blog: Recent Technology Acquisitions: Executing On Our Strategy
John Roese’s blog: Concern about the future of telecom
Buzzboard: Trying out Twitter
Buzzboard: Debate rages …

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Q&A with DiamondWare founder Keith Weiner

DiamondWare founder Keith WeinerYesterday Nortel had two big pieces of news - first the acquisition of 3D voice specialist DiamondWare, and second the unveiling of Nortel’s web.alive virtual collaboration solution (which integrates DiamondWare technology).

With all the glowing comments I’ve heard about DiamondWare, I thought it would be good to get to know them a little better.

Yesterday I had a conversation with Keith Weiner, the founder and CEO of DiamondWare.  Below is our conversation:

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Q: Tell us about yourself and how/why you founded DiamondWare….

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