Nortel and IBM have joined forced in a strategic development agreement, which among other things, menas that the two companies will create a Joint Development Center in North Carolina's Research Triangle Park.
The two companies will collaborate on a variety of research projects including work on a new class of blade servers bringing IBM’s Server Technology and Nortel’s carrier-grade communications expertise together.
The complete release is below.
Nortel, IBM Sign Strategic Development Agreement to Establish Joint Development Center
Initial Focus on Business Transformation, Focused Research, and Collaborative Innovation
Armonk,
As the first step in this technology, research and services relationship, the companies have established a
“This agreement with IBM is a critical component of our strategy to partner for growth,” said Bill Owens, Vice Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Nortel. “Working with IBM, as one of their key partners, is a bold step forward in our efforts to transform our business by reaching an entirely new level of R&D collaboration while reducing our R&D costs, introducing products at a faster pace and serving a broad range of customers more rapidly.”
At the
- work together to enhance and extend current products, drawing from various divisions within Nortel and IBM, to drive new revenue growth while reducing R&D costs
- collaborate on focused research on a project-by-project basis, enabling a new level of product creation by tapping the deep skills of each firm to introduce solutions more rapidly
- work together on technology, initially, a new class of blade servers – bringing together IBM’s Server Technology and Nortel’s carrier-grade communications expertise – that would meet the specific and demanding data flow, reliability and security needs required by the network equipment marketplace embracing next generation network solutions.
Nortel expects to utilize IBM engineering and technical services, for a number of projects, all aimed at broadening Nortel end-to-end broadband, Voice over IP, multimedia services and applications and wireless broadband offerings.
“Nortel is a company with a strong history of innovation. Together, we are working to reduce complexity and cost of service delivery while enabling innovation for a new set of on-demand services. This is at the core of what we do,” said Bill Zeitler, Senior Vice President and Group Executive, IBM Systems and Technology Group.
Mr. Zeitler said this agreement reinforces IBM’s strength and ability to address the Business Performance Transformation Services market opportunity on a wide range of business services across many industries. Areas that IBM can address based on its unique portfolio of technology design, system, software and consulting capabilities.
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This is Nortel, This is the way.
Problems with management at Nortel are nothing new. It appears major problems still exist and they reside at top levels of management. I am aware of this because a friend of mine worked for Nortel, Beijing as information security leader for R&D. He exposed major failures of Asia Corporate Security and Nortel Corporate Security Leaders. He exposed these failures to CEO Mike Z. and was informed there would be no retribution for his actions. Approximately 2 months later, he was demoted two layers of management and assigned to work process quality. Apparently he saved all the email correspondence to track the events. I understand that Information Security Leaders failed to provide a strategy or staff to manage information security and basically exposed Nortel, customer, and partner technologies to the known intellectual property threat from China. He stated he had a letter from his Site leader and manager that acknowledged his performance as accomplishing more in 5 months than had been accomplished in 5 years with Nortel’s Asia leader of Information Security. He also stated the he sent a follow-up email to CEO Mike Z., but never received a reply. It appears his confidential email to the CEO was not kept confidential and cost him his job. I am sure the Board of Directors are clueless to any of these types of things, but they are major management issues, major security issues. Customers, partners or anyone concerned with protecting their intellectual property should be very concerned. Nortel will never turn things around when they punish employees for doing what is best for business and then reward those that seems to do most harm. As has always been true with Nortel. Management will do what is best for Management and not what is best for Nortel, the employees and their customers. Nortel could be a great company again, if Management would only learn.
This is Nortel, This is the way.