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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.

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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 Slaymake
r does a good job describing what needs to be done.

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Nortel IPR a Key Asset

September 16, 2009 7:48 AM


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.

Nortel Avaya- It's Not a Done Deal

September 14, 2009 7:19 AM


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.

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Cisco Watch-Out

September 2, 2009 7:08 AM


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.

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Mike Z Out At Nortel

August 12, 2009 7:15 AM

Mike Z, the last CEO of Nortel, failed on three counts:
1) to rebuild a great company- instead he filed Chapter 11;
2) to re-emerge from bankruptcy- instead he undertook a sale of all its assets; and
3) to get maximum value for these assets- instead only one fourth of the company has been sold and that is under government review, and there is still no plan for getting maximum value from thousands of patents.

Employees, that have built the company and shown so much commitment to service and technology excellence over the years, have been left the task of turning off the lights.

Corporate greed has destroyed a great company and impacted employees, past and present, in so many ways. Very sad.

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Mike Z Out At Nortel

August 12, 2009 7:15 AM

Mike Z, the last CEO of Nortel, failed on three counts:
1) to rebuild a great company- instead he filed Chapter 11;
2) to re-emerge from bankruptcy- instead he undertook a sale of all its assets; and
3) to get maximum value for these assets- instead only one fourth of the company has been sold and that is under government review, and there is still no plan for getting maximum value from thousands of patents.

Employees, that have built the company and shown so much commitment to service and technology excellence over the years, have been left the task of turning off the lights.

Corporate greed has destroyed a great company and impacted employees, past and present, in so many ways. Very sad.

Continue Reading...

The Good and Bad of Avaya-Nortel

July 21, 2009 1:32 PM

Here's my view on the proposed sale of Nortel Enterprise to Avaya.

It's good for Avaya-Nortel's VoIP market position globally.
It's good for Avaya-Nortel's Contact Center market position with two leading portfolios and opportunities for cross opportunities.
It's good for Avaya-Nortel's application and service business, which has been a strong emphasis of both entities.
It's good for Avaya-Nortel's UC position, if they can rationalize their positioning with MSFT and IBM.

It's bad for R&D and support effectiveness since there's a lot of product overlap (five call servers just from Nortel).
It's bad for Nortel's Data business unless Silverlake (private equity owner of Avaya) brings together their Cabletron assets with Nortel's to bring back Bay Networks (or something along those lines).
It's bad for creditors- a lowly US$475m is pttance for a business that generated $2.5B in sales a short time ago.
O yes, and it's bad for Cisco.

Continue Reading...

I recently highlighted Coke's new Freestyle dispenser.

Bob Evans made some great observations: "Coke's new ultrahigh-tech Freestyle dispensers are also new-product labs, customer-experience workshops, wireless repositories, data warehouse gateways, merchandising machines, inventory managers, and, perhaps above all else, truly transformative devices that shift more and more choice, options, and freedom from the seller to the buyer."

He also highlights the fact that Freestyle is the result of the first-ever deep collaboratiuon between Coke's research arm and its IT organization.

There are lots of IT lessons to be learnt here, not the least of which is thta IT needs to understand the business.

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