Nortel Opens Up To Pingtel

This was destined to happen since the man in control over there has been a PingTel fan for quite some time (and since Nortel's disjointed voice development team has been in such shambles for a decade).

Here's a post from 2004:

“Enterasys believes in an open, standards-based approach that enables enterprise CIOs and IT managers broader choices for how and when they deploy communications
services in their IT infrastructure. This philosophy is reflected in the standards-based wired and wireless network infrastructure solutions that we have provided for enterprise customers for many years, as well as our active participation in several industry standards
committees,” said John Roese, CTO of Enterasys Networks. “Pingtel’s open, standardsbased
approach enables the development of a broader and stronger set of solutions in the market, furthering customer choice and value, and reducing costs.”

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Hmmm...John Roese!!! Now do we have any idea who made this decision? Of course we do, and for that matter we should realize that John is making a lot of the decisions regarding where Nortel is headed these days. He is a brilliant guy, but he also has a lot of baggage in Nortel remaining and a LOT of tough decisions that have YET to be made.

Personally, I agree with this move to acquire PingTel although I am not certain as to how well the Nortel partner model and customer base will support these efforts. The major distractor from this effort is the huge Microsoft push that NT has made over the last 24 months with OCS interoperability. Therefore, it seems to me that once again, Nortel has not made any big bets here, and they are still playing in as many sandboxes as they can at the moment versus focusing on a single, bold direction for anything.

-- Guinness

Response to a question in your article...

Your statement:

"Personally, I agree with this move to acquire PingTel although I am not certain as to how well the Nortel partner model and customer base will support these efforts. The major distractor from this effort is the huge Microsoft push that NT has made over the last 24 months with OCS interoperability. Therefore, it seems to me that once again, Nortel has not made any big bets here, and they are still playing in as many sandboxes as they can at the moment versus focusing on a single, bold direction for anything"

My Response:

As a Nortel Partner, I am excited about this acquisition. I have experienced positive feedback within our existing customer base on Nortel's new platforms and I look forward to any new product offerings that may come from this.

Change is inevitable and knowing that a multi-billion dollar company like Nortel is standing behind the development of a "next generation" product, is exciting. I can understand why you would be "less than excited" about this move. The product that you are "clearly" well versed on is now going to be competing with one of the largest communications manufacturers in the world (Nortel). You couple that with the Nortel's highly organized and motivated partners (like us), you have a winning team that is, well, hard to beat.

In part, I am biased in my writing, just as you are. I see a complete different view than you (or so it seems).

I am truly "excited" about the future and what it may bring.

Just my 2 Cents... Bryan J Miles (Sales Engineer)

My feeling is that the Nortel acquisition of Pingtel will and is legitimizing commercial Open Source telephony, taking it out of the science project category. My immediate question is how Nortel will market these solutions and will they get any reseller traction in an Asterisk dominated market.

The Asterisk and other Open Source Telephony vendors culture is dominated by an approach that is completely different than the major telephony vendors such as Nortel, Avaya, and Cisco that bring a lot of proprietary baggage along with them.

My big question is how is Nortel going to transition to an open source based model and culture and can they.

Will they open up the SCS500 and other Nortel|Pingtel solutions for the traditional open source developers and in terms of the customers expectations as to an Open Source Telephony solution?

What is is the competitive advantage they can provide over Digium SwitchVox, Fonality, and other leading Open Source Telephony vendors to the open source community and to our resellers? Will Nortel be as open?

Moe Schwartz - Tedchnical Director Westcon

Is open source really about "culture" or isn't it like everything else about fame and money? There are at least 50+ venture financed companies now in our industry, Pingtel, Fonality and Digium included, that adopted an open source business model. For all these companies whoever provides the money expects a return.

Digium's model is to give away a platform called Asterisk, up-selling users on gateway cards and the closed source and proprietary Asterisk management system called SwitchVox.

Fonality's model is to sell a complete solution in a semi-hosted setup based on the free platform Asterisk. Gateway card revenue goes to Sangoma. Fonality’s hosted management system is closed source proprietary.

Nortel's model is to use a fully featured and fully open source free version of its product in open source to seed the market and accelerate adoption, up-selling customers and VARs on a fully supported product.

There should be nothing wrong with either variant of this model. What I think is plain wrong is to assume that there is a separate and dedicated market for open source. Customers need a new phone system and they consider alternatives, all of which have slightly different attributes. The fact that a particular solution is open source might matter in some cases, but will not make any difference in most customers’ decision to buy.

Once we accept this the question becomes what model (open source, closed source, or whatever) will translate into the highest market share once the transition to IP based communications applications is completed. We at Pingtel/Nortel believe that any successful future solution has to be open, fully standards compliant and interoperable. But even more important it has to be easy to use, administer, install and sell.

This last thought points at another important difference between Asterisk and sipXecs: sipXecs is meant for non-technical people. You don't have to be an engineer able to "program" dialplans and other things in order to successfully get it up and running and use it. Whether Asterisk VARs will find this attractive depends on where they see their main value add. If their key value is that they "know how to get Asterisk deployed and working" this might not be attractive to them. If they serve a fast growing customer group and have difficulty scaling with a skill and labor intensive product such as Asterisk, sipXecs might be just right. When it comes to end user price and VAR margin you might be quite surprised as you compare the per seat VAR transfer and end user prices between different contending solutions, Digium and Fonality included. Open source alone does not necessarily mean lowest cost as Nortel demonstrates with the SCS500 offering.

When it comes to "culture" it is kind of interesting. Most engineers thrive in an environment that is productive and efficient. So if you look at open source as a model to get the best product to market the fastest, I would bet that essentially every engineering team would embrace it easily. That's what happened at Nortel over the course of last year. All the participating Engineers loved it and do not want to go back.

Thanks for the quick followup.

I still would like to know the real price differential in terms that an existing opensource reseller can understand. This would be important as to positioning Nortel into this market which is extremely price sensitive and offers very high margins to those resllers.

Also resllers are asking if can they buy the existing Pingtel SIPxchange ECS software and appliances through Nortel distribution.