Nortel Buzzboard

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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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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Strolling around the web yesterday and this morning, it was hard to miss the coverage and discussion around Gartner’s release of its new Corporate Telephony Magic Quadrant (note that this report is separate from their unified comms MQ).

So far, most of the conversation has been around the appropriateness of Microsoft’s positioning — and even inclusion — in the MQ.  Eric Krapf and others at No Jitter have a running conversation going on this topic, including a link to the actual Gartner MQ report (apparently thanks to an Avaya purchase of the MQ for distribution purposes).

Interestingly, while much of the debate on No Jitter centers on Microsoft’s ranking as a “Visionary”, Microsoft isn’t even ranked highest on the “completeness …

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This morning Nortel issued this press release announcing the acquisition of Pingtel. This acquisition strengthens Nortel’s efforts in providing an open-source unified communications solution.

Back in April, I blogged about Nortel’s new open-source UC solution for SMBs, the SCS 500. The SCS 500 is based on sipXecs (not Asterisk), which is a SIP-based open-source IP-PBX platform for VoIP. To-date, Nortel has contributed more than 300 new applications and features to sipXecs, helping transform its use into a full-featured unified communications platform capable of integrating VoIP, instant messaging, presence, on-demand audio/video conferencing, and unified messaging.

So how does Pingtel relate to all this?

Well it turns out that …

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Recently here at Nortel’s Richardson campus we had a “technology day” that allows the entire employee base to get an inside view on the various labs and customer showrooms that we have on campus. I took the opportunity to take a few pictures and a little video of the event.

Various R&D and tech leaders set up peds in the Nortel cafeteria to talk about the areas they focused on. You can see a quick video of that part of the event here:

In addition, employees were able to sign up for tours of the various local Nortel labs and customer showcase areas. Below are some …

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I listened in on Nortel’s 2Q08 earnings call this morning, led by Nortel CEO Mike Zafirovski and CIO CFO Pavi Binning. You can access their presentations slides and hear a replay of the call here if you are interested.

Below are a few interesting points that I took from the call (not necessarily in order of the conversation on the call).

Revenue for the quarter was at $2.6 billion, up 2% year-over-year. For 1H08, Nortel’s revenue is now up 7% YoY.
Mike Z and Pavi Binning highlighted several times the continued progress with gross margins and operating margins. In the press release, Mike Z highlights: “We delivered gross margin of 43.1%, the seventh consecutive quarter of year-over-year improvement, and management operating margin of 4.3%, the eighth consecutive quarter of year-over-year improvement.”
The presentation highlighted gross margin improvements in Carrier Networks, Enterprise Solutions, and Global Services.
The presentation highlighted “significant improvements in G&A,” driven by cost reductions in IT and finance.
Mike Z said that in the second half of 2008, Nortel would be increasing and refocusing sales resources to focus on the growth segments of 40gig and unified communications
Mike Z said that: We have invested heavily in Enterprise and MEN, and we are starting to see the trajectory to growth in those areas.
A quick mention of an org change was mentioned, as Samih Elhage was announced as the new leader of the Carrier VoIP and Applications business.
Carrier Networks: quarterly revenue was down 2% YoY. CDMA revenue down 10%, with GSM/UMTS revenue up 11% YoY. The decrease in CDMA revenues, along with comments during the presentation of a slowdown in U.S. carrier spending were discussed during the call. One analyst asked about Nortel’s CDMA market share, to which Mike Z responded: “…certainly over the last couple of years we have gained [CDMA] market share and we don’t expect to lose that going forward.”
Enterprise Solutions: revenues were up 3% YoY. Gross margins increased while management operating margins decreased, reflecting increased marketing and R&D spending in the area. An analyst point out that the enterprise businesses still didn’t have a positive margin, and asked Mike Z how confident he was in this changing in 2H08. Mike Z commented that gross margin in the enterprise business had improved nicely in the quarter, and that Nortel expects enterprise to have a positive OM in the 2nd half.
Metro Ethernet: Revenues were up 4% YoY, with gross margins flat and management operating margin up. Several times during the presentation, Mike Z highlighted the growing momentum for Nortel’s 40gig solution. Nortel now has twenty 40gig wins, plus five tier one trials. Mike highlighted that at the last update (the analyst day event) that number was at 14 wins.
Global Services: Revenues were up 9%, with higher gross margins and management operating margins. A quick calculation shows that Global Services accounted for just over 20% of Nortel’s total revenues in 2Q08.

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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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Will the day ever come when your average white collar worker won’t have a phone at his (or her) desk?

Earlier this week IDC put out a press release entitled “IP Telephony Holds Strong in the Face of Unified Communications (UC) Hype,” highlighting the findings of their 2007 IP Telephony report.

IDC says IP-PBX and IP Phone shipments remained strong in 2007, even with the introduction of desktop unified communications solutions last year from Microsoft and IBM. The absence of a cratering IP-PBX market shouldn’t be much of a surprise to anyone — even Microsoft doesn’t expect people to rip out their phone systems and replace them with OCS anytime soon. …

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The Nortel and Microsoft Innovative Communications Alliance (ICA) has a new public customer today — arvato systems — one of the first ICA customers in Germany. arvato systems provides clients with IT services supporting the the use, management, and distribution of media (such consulting, concept design, development, implementation, and operation). This is a natural extension of their parent company, global media and communication services provider arvato AG.

Their new UC network pulls together voice, email, conferencing, video and instant messaging into a single interface (Microsoft OCS 2007). But it’s the services side of this deployment that makes it an interesting win.

In our UC alliance with Microsoft, Nortel has emphasized the services revenue potential that the …

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Anytime you invite dozens of the region’s most important media and analysts to come and talk to your senior execs, it’s probably a good idea to have a lot of news to talk about.

That’s exactly what Nortel is doing this week with a panoply of press releases related to the APAC region — all in support of this week’s Nortel Asia Summit in Sydney, Australia.

I’ve already talked about two of the releases, the 40gig win with Southern Cross Cables and the appointment of new leaders for the APAC region, but most of the week’s news has been focused on new unified communications deployments. While some of last year’s media hype about UC has quieted a …

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