John Roese’s Blog CTO, Nortel

Location: Ottawa, Canada

It was a busy and good week at Nortel this past week.

In addition to announcing an upside to our Q1 revenues, having a constructive Annual Shareholders’ Meeting, and getting ready for the 10th Anniversary of Tour Nortel, an Ottawa event held yesterday that raised more than $680,000 for the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario (CHEO), there was another event that marked a milestone in the evolution of the telecom industry and in Nortel.

Last Tuesday (May 1), we announced that we were selected as the Official Converged Network Equipment Supplier for the Vancouver 2010 Winter Games. This follows our selection by our long-time customer and partner Bell Canada, as their WAN technology equipment supplier for the Games. (Bell Canada is the exclusive Telecommunications Services Provider and Premier National Partner for the 2010 Winter Games.) The net result is that from a networking technology perspective, Nortel equipment will provide the foundation for the communications experience of the Games.

Although every modern Olympic and Paralympic Games has had a telecom capability and Nortel gear has supported many prior Games, what makes these ones particularly interesting is that they will be the first Games based entirely on IP, and Nortel will be providing the gear.

For the first time, the telecom transport infrastructure will be totally converged - for voice, data, video broadcast, mobility and every other communications service. This is exciting because the moment that mainstream events on the world stage (some 3 billion people will see the Games in person, on TV and/or on the Internet) can take for granted that a technology will work and just simply should be the technology of choice, is the moment when we have passed the legacy tipping point.

What it says is that we are no longer hedging our bets with legacy technology because we have confidence that IP technologies are core to telecom. I’m sure many of you have views of other moments in time when this has already happened (IP has been around for a long time and many industries have been all-IP for a decade or more), but when an all-IP Games happens, that is a validation unlike any other.

What this means for Nortel and telecom is interesting in that it should now be clear that we are indeed entering a new era of communications and that, in this era, the technologies that have led us to this point must now be trusted to simply work flawlessly.

This means that carrier-class resiliency is expected everywhere, that scale matters because this technology will be used to support not just single businesses but the entire world, and that our future efforts must be focused on using the modern platform as a basis for all telecom functions.

The reality is that the telecom industry of the future (and even the present) is about an ecosystem of technologies and applications that come together on a set of common elements, such as IP and Web Services and Ethernet. We see that via cooperation and linkage between relevant players - such as ourselves, Bell and others - that we have the potential to deliver the kinds of communications experiences that are needed by business and by world events like the Vancouver 2010 Winter Games.

That experience is about applications working to support infrastructure and vice versa. It is about carrier and enterprise boundaries blurring. And, it is about wireless and wireline networking being just two elements of an end-to-end seamless system.

This is the vision that we began articulating in 2006 around the ideas and concepts of hyperconnectivity. To see it play out on the world stage of Vancouver in 2010 is both humbling and exciting.

I look forward to, in the future, sharing more about the technology and capabilities that will support this great event.