Is Nortel on the rebound?

It sure looks that way these past few weeks. I generally try to keep all the posts here very technical and absent of opinion but there’s been a lot of attention lately on how Nortel appears to be starting to emerge from the watery hole it’s been in for the past six years. While their product lines for the enterprise have been fairly successful, Nortel has struggled financially ever since the 2002 dot-com financial bust.

We utilize both Nortel and Motorola at my current place of employment, and have done so for the the past 12 years, ever since I started with the organization. Six months ago I was asked, “what will happen with our data, voice and wireless networks if Nortel and/or Motorola go under?” It was and still is a very valid question from an enterprise standpoint. My answer was simple and straightforward, “we’ll cross that bridge when and if we come to it”.

It would seem that Nortel has recently decided to take off the gloves and come out swinging with a very big marketing campaign around their lower power consumption.

Larry Dignan posted an article entitled, “Can Nortel pull an AMD on Cisco?”

Jason Hiner posted an entry on his blog entitled, “Nortel claims that it is siphoning network customers away from Cisco“.

While there might be some “inflated” marketing claims in Nortel’s pitch it would appear that the basic claims are true and accurate. There were some interesting videos posted on YouTube from the recent Interop 2008 convention.

I will say that I have been very happy with both Nortel and Motorola. They have provided cost effective, reliable solutions for some very demanding business critical applications.

I would also agree that Cisco makes some really great products. It just seems that they need a few competitors to keep them honest these days with respect to price and service.

You can see “The Nortel Tax Relief Plan” for yourself.

Cheers!