Let’s see if there will be any announcements concerning Nortel’s Enterprise division come July 1, 2009.
It certainly seems that Nortel is literally done as all talk of restructuring their debt and emerging from bankruptcy have evaporated and the “everything must go” chant is flying about everywhere.
While it sounds like Nortel’s CDMA business and LTE R&D unit will go to Nokia Siemens pending the completion of the “stalking horse” deal, the jury is still out on Nortel’s Enterprise business although the rumors all point to Avaya as the front runner. If that comes to fruition it will be interesting to see how Avaya plans to transition existing customers away from legacy Nortel products to Avaya products. Or how long they will support the legacy Nortel software and/or equipment before they sunset it.
Is it time to jump ship yet… you might want to check that you have enough lifeboats.
Cheers!
I wouldn’t jump yet… Something doesn’t seem right. I can see that they may try and shave off the “fat” of the company. Yet they aren’t trying to sell like crazy. Something else to think about, they keep releasing alot of code. Something is up…
Unfortunately there’s a lot of politics in play for a lot of us… you could say that this was the “proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back”.
In my specific case I have a large data center move where I really can’t recommend Nortel given the their current situation, especially for a six digit purchase. I’ve had to look at Juniper, HP, Brocade and Cisco for a solution. While each of them has their strengths and weaknesses it’s a large undertaking to sort it all out and get apples to apples designs. I will say that I’m impressed with the Cisco Nexus 7010. I’m also amazed to see Cisco finally getting away from Spanning Tree with their Virtual Port Channel feature. I’m still amazed how far the industry was behind Nortel on this one… again a shame Nortel wasn’t able to fully market the possibilities to the masses.
I understand from some folks that Nortel is really focusing on “fine tuning” the software in their products, trying to use this period to build on the stability of each product. I’m not sure if that means that product development from a hardware perspective is on hold but I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that. I know Nortel has been working on the VSP9000 for quite sometime now but you’ve got to wonder how much R&D is going on at this point.
There was even an article suggesting that Nortel was starting to cut the ties with Microsoft’s Unified Communications partnership.
Regardless of what happens we have a LOT of Nortel gear that will be here for years and years to come.
Thanks for the comment!
stuff starts getting done when your job is on the line! Strangely the same happened with the Nortel TPS products that run Sourcefire. No updates for weeks/months. Then they announce MD/EOL of the product line and now updates come out every week or two, if not more!
I hope something good comes of it though. I have two horses in this race. I’m employed by a prof services company and our primary vendor is Nortel (mostly data though, which is probably better for us if Avaya buys it, Data should be safe). And my father is a sales guy at Nortel (who is still selling, thankfully most of our customers are still loyal to us and Nortel!)
Very interesting… someone was telling me not to long ago that the riffraff had all but left (jumped ship) leaving only their best engineers and software developers.
I’ve always been impressed by Snort even years ago when it was in it’s infancy. It is amazing to see how far Snort has come and what Martin Roesch has made of it. I’ll probably be looking hard at Sourcefire in a few months time as I look to replace an aging IBM ISS Site Protector installation.
I certainly hope things pan out for yourself and all the other Nortel employees who I’ve had the pleasure of working with and/or meeting in person.
Thanks for the comment!
Will the fun never stop?
The rumor mill today is that Avaya has walked away from the table and the folks at Nortel are curious if Avaya ever had any real interest in making a purchase. When will it end I ask you all… with FTC approval out of the way all bids for the Nortel wireless division need to be submitted by July 21st with the auction set for July 24th. Once the wireless division is sold I would guess that we’ll see something happen with the enterprise division.
Cheers!
It seems that RIM is crying fowl in the bidding process for the wireless division.
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/072109-rim-shut-out-of-nortel.html
Let the saga continue!