We spent some time compiling what the community of tech buyers is searching for on TMCnet this year and were a bit surprised. The top result was Orange – the U.K based carrier followed by the largest tech company in China – Huawei and then the FCC and Verizon. Why Orange, we wondered? Nortel was a bit of a surprise to us as well because they no longer exist. Perhaps the results show just how much content TMCnet has written about Canadian-based Northern Telecom over the decades?

Technically, the company went bankrupt and was split and sold to GENBAND and Avaya – Interestingly, Mark Straton who used to head up Siemens Enterprise Communications was on a panel last week at ITEXPO and mentioned his company drove up the price of Nortel during the bankruptcy process – this in part led to the recent Avaya bankruptcy.

Other surprises – Ovum is a research firm but hit the top ten… So did RingCentral – coming in just under iPhone!

The Acision brand no longer exists. It became Comverse then Xura and soon will become Mavenir Systems.

Quintum is another surprise – the company made VoIP gateways back in the day but the brand hasn’t been used for many years.

MIT made the list as the only university – interesting but not really as TMCnet is a tech site.

Notable items missing were IBM, Google and Microsoft – for whatever reason.

Anyone else you think should have made the list but seems mysteriously absent? Be sure to let us know in the comments… Thanks!