All About Nortel

According to The Deal, Force 10 has turned down a $500-million offer from Nortel. VC Ratings  said one of Force 10’s investors said the company wants to do an IPO worth at least $1-billion within 18 months. Force 10’s investors include Morgenthaler Ventures, Meritech Capital Partners, Crosslink Capital, U.S. Venture Partners, New Enterprise Associates and Worldview Technology [...]

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Bill Durling, Nortel’s head of public relations, is moving on - hopefully to greener and better pastures. Who knows, maybe Nortel might hire a Canadian as his successor.

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After being pushed aside since the end of the telecom boom, fiber-optic network equipment is staging a comeback. So says Nortel CTO John Roese who said demand is increasing as the amount of Internet traffic steadily increases. “That Internet bubble that happened in 2000, where we over-built the optical domain, and everybody said we’d never [...]

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After keeping a very low profile for many months, Nortel CEO Mike Zafirovski has started a pull-court press to court Canadian investors. After speaking at the Canadian Club earlier this week in Toronto (a 30-minute presentation bereft of anything newsworthy other than calling the federal government the most “e-centric” in the world), Mike Z. is [...]

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Nortel will provide Videotron Ltee, Canada’s third-largest cableco, with softswitches and media gateways so its can offer IP-based services as video calling and unified messaging while expanding the reach and features of its popular VoIP service. Videotron’s cable telephone service has attracted 283,000 customers since it was launched in February 2005 - most of them coming [...]

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Canada’s investment community will get a chance today to hear Nortel CEO Mike Zafirovski give a keynote speech today at the Canadian Club. Last week, Zafirovski gave a few media interview where he touched upon everything from potential acquisitions (unlikely) to the the company’s prospects (lots of hard work ahead but getting brighter). It should [...]

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The Register takes a look at which suppliers are supplying equipment for Telus’ IP-TV build out. For the Nortel, the good news is it won a high-profile contract over rivals such as Microsoft, Alcatel, Lucent and Siemens. Another Telus supplier is Minerva Networks, which will supply the middleware. Minerva’s software is being embraced by Cisco [...]

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With nearly a year under his belt as CEO, Nortel’s Mike Zafirovski is confident the company is on the right path, although he concedes the pace of change would be faster. In a National Post story today (registration required), Zafirovski said he is interested in making “disciplined acquisitions” but feels there is no urgency to [...]

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Looks like Nortel CEO Mike Zafirovski is ready to meet the public. He’s giving a keynote speech at the Canadian Club on Sept. 25 in Toronto. Here’s the Canadian Club’s sales pitch:
“Perhaps no industry today faces more leadership challenges than the telecommunications business. (editor’s note: that’s a huge understatement, isn’t it?) As president and CEO [...]

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Maybe Nortel should carve out a competitive niche by focusing its efforts on serving the railway industry. Last month, it signed a deal with an Algerian Railway involving GSM-R technology; and today it unveiled a GSM-R contract with India’s Indian Railway to improve safety and efficiency in Uttar Pradesh - site of one of the [...]

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