September 2009 Archives

This is my last blog posting, two years to the day and 160+ postings after entering the blogsphere, and six months after retiring from Nortel, where I worked for 37 years. I left out the front door, but was saddened to leave a company that had entered bankruptcy and was being sold off.

Having my own blog been fun and quite a learning experience!

Throughout I tried to educate, entertain and promote Nortel's cause in this exciting new medium.

Great set of articles crossed my desk on connecting a broad range of sensors in various forms.

We've all heard about and probably used toll-collection tags, security access key cards and retail tags, but many new apps are coming our way.

For example,
How about the first WiFi pacemaker that allows the doctor to monitor its performance? Could be life saving.

Certainly not.

But Larry Roberts, one of the founding fathers of the Internet, says that the Internet, the underlying fabric of Hyperconnectivity, is.

He suggests that traditional routers, such as those from Cisco and Juniper, just don't have the price/performance required to support Hyperconnectivity, the "exploding network of people, computing and things" (my term).

Larry suggests that you need flow-based routing to solve the problem, basically bringing back virtual circuits (introduced back in the mid-70s) to the packet world (and also visible in label switching or MPLS).

Infoweek 500 's annual survey provides an industry-by-industry view of investment strategies.

Across most industries, the response to "What has been the most effective productivity push?", the answer is "new forms of collaboration software." This can take various forms, such as Unified Communications, social networking, and web conferencing.

There were a few noted exceptions. For example, in retail, Business Intelligence solutions are king, not surprising given that understanding customers is so important to the top and bottom lines.

This bodes well for UC suppliers, who need to sell the values of their solutions, with an eye on non-traditional suppliers of other forms of collaboration software, including those that deliver cloud computing solutions.

The US DoJ is apparently investigating whether there are any anti-trust aspects in the Avaya purchase of Nortel Enterprise.

When I visited the DoJ web site, I couldn't find anything on this, suggesting it's in very early stages, though my Nortel friends tell me that the DoJ is in an intensive data-gathering mode.

Here's my take.

This is a highly competitive market that is being transformed from a PBX-centric environment to one that is "UC as an application"-centric.

The courts approved the acquisition of Nortel Enterprise by Avaya and dismissed any Verizon objectives.

My Nortel friends tell me that the acquisition is moving ahead, anticipating the the DoJ investigation will not impact these plans (my take on the DoJ in an upcoming blog).

Now execution begins towards long-awaited industry consolidation.

Sorell Slaymaker does a good job describing what needs to be done.

While one can question the tactics of Research In Motion's co-CEO< Mike Lazaridis in challenging the sale of Nortel's Wireless business, there is a net benefit.

Nortel was a technology-driven company with many brilliant engineers. Over the decades, their collective work has moved the technology forward, created business opportunities, and established Nortel leadership.

It is now clearly understood that Nortel's key patents should not be sold outright with the business units and should be monetized in some other way: either sold on their own and or even established as an on-going revenue stream.

After a marathon auction, Avaya has agreed to buy Nortel's Enterprise business for $900M, much better than the original $475M. Great selling job, Nortel!

A while back I blogged:
"It's good for Avaya-Nortel's VoIP market position globally." It's still so. Cisco watch out.
"It's good for Avaya-Nortel's Contact Center market position with two leading portfolios and opportunities for cross opportunities." It's still so, but antitrust concerns in this area may delay the purchase, which is bad all around.
"It's good for Avaya-Nortel's application and service business, which has been a strong emphasis of both entities." This is a huge opportunity, as it 's central to the new world of telecom.
It's good for Avaya-Nortel's UC position, if they can rationalize their positioning with MSFT and IBM." I see this as a major challenge, as Avaya has not been a leader in this space.

"It's bad for R&D and support effectiveness since there's a lot of product overlap (five call servers just from Nortel)." This is a huge challenge going forward.
"It's bad for Nortel's Data business unless Silver Lake Partners (private equity owner of Avaya) brings together their Cabletron assets with Nortel's to bring back Bay Networks (or something along those lines)." There has been no indication that this will happen.

Let's not talk serious photography.

But consider that there are more cameras sold as as a feature on a cell phone than as stand-alone devices.

In fact, Telus, the second largest carrier in Canada, just bought over 100 Black's Camera stores, to get retail space.

The industry never ceases to amaze me.

Andrew raises some good points about iPhone apps and makes you wonder how lock-in can be avoided by enterprise IT.

Alan Sulkin, an experienced market watcher, has published his 2Q09 North American view on IP Telephony market shares, putting Cisco at #1 and Avaya and Nortel as #2 and #3 respectively.

According to Alan, Nortel + Avaya, if no other bidders submit bids by the end of the week, would be #1 with a combined 27% vs 21% share for Cisco.

A couple of other interesting points:

The market 'rebounded' by some 10%, a positive indicator of CIO mindsets on economic recovery.

This may be Alan's last IP Telephony share analysis as he argues that all PBXs support IP in some form and so the IP PBX designation is no longer relevant.