Obviously putting aside the recent restatement and the surprising departure of its CFO, CRN Australia has a glowing story on Nortel called “Is this Nortel’s Year?” that puts the spotlight on the fine folks within Nortel’s media relations group. According to the article, CEO Mike Zafirovski is doing a great job, Nortel’s enterprise efforts are starting to gain momentum and its channel partners are getting more enthusiastic. Of course, this may be all true but the rule about Nortel that everyone should have learned in recent years is you need to throttle back your enthusiasm just in case.
Another feeble attempt to revamp the channel program without any real investment. Schoch talks about removing growth caps, increasing incentives, etc. The reality is that Nortel is just moving money from one bucket to another. Mike Z comments that Nortel will be growing services revenue. One way Nortel is trying to accomplish this is by charging for technical support services that were previously free. So, remove caps on incentives, but increase the cost of technical support on products that don’t have the greatest track record of superior quality. I know of at least two previously exclusive Nortel channel partner that have started to multi-source in the past six months because they see through the spin.
Also, ask yourself why this news was picked up by CRN Australia when it is a North America program. Where is the US and CA press? Nice work media team!!!
http://techiqmag.com/topics/voip/ The VAR Guy
Every few months Nortel teases us with an apparent turnaround — only to stumble again. As a reporter who has covered the company since 1998, I think they might finally have the right CEO in place, and the right strategy in place for unified communications. Blogging daily about Cisco vs. Nortel at http://techiqmag.com/topics/voip/
The Nortel PR Machine Strikes Again
Obviously putting aside the recent restatement and the surprising departure of its CFO, CRN Australia has a glowing story on Nortel called “Is this Nortel’s Year?” that puts the spotlight on the fine folks within Nortel’s media relations group. According to the article, CEO Mike Zafirovski is doing a great job, Nortel’s enterprise efforts are starting to gain momentum and its channel partners are getting more enthusiastic. Of course, this may be all true but the rule about Nortel that everyone should have learned in recent years is you need to throttle back your enthusiasm just in case.