What Nortel Should do Now

Nortel will be cutting 2,100 jobs and shifting about one thousand more to areas which have lower costs. These actions are in response to a wider loss in the fourth quarter.

The company remains optimistic about its long term future and they are in a good position from the standpoint of having an enterprise and carrier business. As I have said in the past, generally, one is strong while the other is weak.

The challenge for Nortel may just be the sheer size of the company which makes it difficult to manage. Having so many divisions and product lines makes it tougher to turn the ship on a dime.

I have a number of strong relationships across the carrier and enterprise sides of the business and as an outsider I feel the company can do better if it brings its various units together even more closely than they currently work.

This is not an easy task of course but the company has solid technology, a great relationship with Microsoft and plays in multiple spaces which should offset one another.

These job cuts along with some restructuring could help the telecom giant become more nimble which should assist them as they head into a tougher economic environment.

And one last point… Nortel has a once in a lifetime head start with its Microsoft relationship. Virtually all other PBX makers are playing catch up. They need to capitalize on this lead immediately.

In addition they need to become the defacto way that service providers deploy hosted unified communications based on Microsoft technologies.

They also need a marketing partner program to get service providers to sell such services. They need to assist their service provider customers in driving enterprise demand.

They are already ahead of virtually all other players in the Microsoft UC space and especially the hosted Microsoft UC space but until you read this blog you may not have known it.

It is now up to Nortel to tell the world about how far ahead they are.

They have a superior market position today… If they execute correctly they will be a force to be reckoned with.

They have the ball… Now the question is, how fast can they run with it?

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