Nortel Buzzboard

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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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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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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Next year when the New York Mets start the new baseball season in their brand new world-class stadium — Citi Field — Nortel will be powering their network infrastructure.

That’s probably an understatement of Nortel’s involvement, as Nortel will be lead systems integrator, custom application developer, and sole architect of the network.  Some of those “custom applications” possible in the future for fans in the stadium include player statistics via wireless LAN, IPTV-based replays, and special multimedia-based comms to various areas of Citi Field.

The actual network for the stadium is a complete unified communications solution that includes: VoIP using the CS 1000 IP-PBX, Nortel’s …

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Last week Net Payne, the leader of Nortel’s North American marketing efforts, talked to Greg Hebert as part of Greg’s Business@Night show on Ottawa radio station CFRA.

On the show, Net talks to Greg about a variety of topics, including Nortel’s external energy efficiency efforts with our products, the Cisco Energy Tax, and the Nortel Energy Efficiency Calculator.

You can listen to the interview below:

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Nortel has added a new dynamic to the ongoing battle against the Cisco Energy Tax…

Cold, hard cash.

Today Nortel unveiled a new program that gives new Nortel enterprise data customers an up-front credit of their estimated first-year energy savings over a comparable Cisco network. Normally I don’t get into sales promotions on this Nortel blog, but this program is so unique I couldn’t ignore it.

Earlier this year, I talked about how the Cisco energy tax isn’t about “green”, it’s about money. And while saving 40% on your network’s total energy bill goes straight to the company’s bottom line, many IT departments don’t even see the energy bill, let alone care about it.

This new program eliminates any …

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Add Australian contact center outsourcing specialist PCI to the list of companies that are taking energy efficiency into consideration when building their networks.

In this press release from last week, PCI CEO Phil Allan is quoted saying: “As with any large-scale technology rollout one of the biggest costs is the energy to power and cool the equipment. Nortel demonstrated such a clear lead in this regard with its energy-frugal equipment that the savings in ongoing operation and lower TCO were reasons alone to choose its solution, not counting all the other benefits it offered.”

PCI, who is building a new 6,000 square meter facility in Melbourne to accommodate its growth, is deploying a solution built on the Nortel CS …

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Analyst firm In-Stat says that the practice of using custom ASICs by some equipment vendors is putting them at a disadvantage for energy efficiency.

In an Information Alert published last month entitled “Going Green - Network Equipment Vendors Address Energy Efficiency,” In-Stat says that:
Vendors who are already designing equipment with advanced off-the-shelf silicon solutions will have an advantage. These vendors will benefit from both favorable regulations and the technological know-how of large chip vendors like Broadcom, who offer solutions with significantly higher energy efficiency and processing capacity.
To quickly break down what that means - the term “off-the-shelf silicon solutions” refers to an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC), which is basically a microchip that …

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Yesterday I highlighted the availability of the new online interactive Nortel Energy Efficiency Calculator (iNEEC). The other part of the news in yesterday’s press release was to show that enterprise customers were increasingly considering product energy efficiency when making their network purchase decisions.

If you’ve been following this blog for a while, that may seem like old news since Nortel has been claiming this since Interop. But yesterday’s release provides actual customer and channel partner affirmation that energy efficiency really is top-of-mind.

For example, Sean O’Hara, manager of Systems Engineering at Prairie Cardiovascular said, “Not only were we able to achieve a highly redundant network core, we realized a significant savings of both power and …

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Here on Buzzboard we’ve talked a lot about the Cisco Energy Tax and Nortel energy efficiency. Part of that conversation has been around a wonderful but hard to find little tool called the Nortel Energy Efficiency Calculator (NEEC) that allows you to compare Nortel and Cisco energy efficiency.

A star at tradeshows and customer meetings, the NEEC has been hard to bring to the masses because its original incarnation was as a very sophisticated interactive Excel spreadsheet.

Until now.

Today, Nortel announced that the NEEC is now the web-based Interactive NEEC (iNEEC of course) and available online for anyone to use. I have tried out the iNEEC myself and it’s quite a tool — allowing you …

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