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 …

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Last week at Global Connect, one message I heard over and over was around the growth of INNUA — the International Nortel Networks Users Association. At the opening keynote session, INNUA President Steve Ford said thatmore than 500 new companies had joined INNUA in the last couple of months, and that membership had increased more than 5% YTD with several chapters having doubled in size.

Joel Hackney, Nortel’s president of enterprise solutions, spoke right after Steve Ford and added that end user attendance for Global Connect was up 41% versus last year (at a time when travel is being restricted).

So is all this growth with Nortel’s enterprise users’ group a pre-indicator of a coming Nortel …

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The big news that came out yesterday from Verizon is that VZW is buying Alltel in a deal valued at $28.1 billion. But completely crushed underneath the weight of that big news was another announcement that Verizon made yesterday. While it didn’t have the glamor of a multi-billion dollar acquisition, Verizon’s other release should be of interest to this blog’s readers, as well as the equipment vendors that sell to Verizon.

Yesterday, Verizon announced that it had provided the manufacturers of certain equipment a “target” for getting 20 percent greater efficiency than today’s gear does by January 1, 2009.

For those of you without a calendar, that’s just over 6 months away.

To do this, Verizon said that it …

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Nortel MCS 5100 users now interoperates with the Polycom RPX HD 200 seriesOne item I’ve neglected to cover as part of all the happenings at Global Connect this week is the wave of Nortel partner* announcements that were issued this week.

Since these items were issued from the partners and not posted on the press releases page on nortel.com, they are sometimes easily missed even if you cover Nortel closely.

So here’s a quick summary, along with some links to the actual partner releases:

Polycom, an existing Nortel Telepresence partner, announced that its RMX 2000 real-time media conferencing platform and HDX series of high …

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Earlier this week Joel Hackney, Nortel’s president of Enterprise Solutions, gave some early thoughts on Global Connect. With the event over, Joel had a few parting thoughts on the event. Here is his guest post:

[Note - when I originally posted this last night, I accidentally “back-dated” it to yesterday morning. I have since corrected it so this morning so it will show up at the top of the blog posting list]

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Joel Hackney, Nortel President of Enterprise SolutionsI wanted to take this opportunity to share a few closing thoughts on Global Connect. Bo has done a fantastic job keeping readers up to speed on what’s going on at …

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Nortel president and CEO Mike Zafirovski has been busy this week talking about Nortel’s turnaround story. First on Tuesday, he talked to customers as a keynote speaker at INNUA’s Global Connect event in Grapevine, Texas.

There were various media and analyst at the event (some of which he talked to separately), and some of them have written about their thoughts on Mike Z’s presentation and the event overall:

How Nortel Networks is Getting its Groove Back in ITBusinss.ca - which among other topics goes into some detail on how Nortel’s alliance with Microsoft is bringing credibility back to the company.
Nortel’s Return from Doom in FierceVoIP - which summarizes …

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Former Dallas Cowboy and NFL Hall of Famer Roger Staubach was the closing speaker at INNUA’s Global Connect 2008.

Global Connect is over, but during the last three days I’ve built up a back-log of subjects to write about from the people I’ve talked to and things I’ve seen. So over the next few days you’ll continue to see some coverage items from the show.

One of those items is yesterday’s closing session, where the featured speaker was former Dallas Cowboy and NFL Hall of Famer Roger Staubach. He was known as Roger the Dodger, Captain Comeback, Captain America — Roger was the leader of …

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Well Global Connect is almost over, and I’m very happy to say that INNUA President Steve Ford was gracious enough to use this blog to give us his thoughts from the show. Here’s Steve’s post:

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Steve Ford, INNUA PresidentAs you can see from the rest of the Global Connect coverage on this blog, it has been a jam packed week full of excitement with well over 2,000 Nortel customers and solution providers.

Our INNUA Board of Directors was privileged to have a private meeting with Mike Zafirovski, Nortel President and CEO, on Monday. It was great to have him back with us at our event this year …

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It’s Day 3 at Global Connect, the last day of the event. I’ve said this already, but it has been a very well-run event in my opinion. I’ve also heard from several others that the “vibe” is better this year versus past events.

Today at Global Connect there aren’t any opening keynote sessions, so no Live Blogging this morning. Actually, today’s the day at Global Connect where attendees are able to do certification testing. I’m going to wander that way later today and see if I can talk to someone about the details.

Related posts
Pics from day 2
Mike Z keynote…

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Wow the day is almost over already. After the keynote session this morning that Mike Z headlined, I’ve spent a lot of time today walking around with my video camera in hand. Over the last two days I’ve been able to interview a member of the INNUA Board of Directors, as well as several people in the Nortel enterprise data team who work directly on our energy efficiency efforts. Those videos are coming soon.

Related posts
Mike Z keynote
Exhibit hall opens
User’s Open Forum
GC Awards Lunch
Hackney guest blog
Opening session live blog

For now, below are a couple of old …

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