With all the focus on video, IP-TV and Google-YouTuben acquisition, VoIP has gone from belle of the ball to shrinking violet. The reality, however, is VoIP is still very much alive and well. All you have to do is look at Vonage’s growth, the fact Skype has now had its software downloaded more than 500 million times, and North American cablecos are aggressively pushing into the telephone business.
This is proving to be good news for Avaya and Nortel, which have taken a head’s down approach to VoIP. At the VoiceCon conference Avaya CEO Louis D’Ambrosio and Nortel CEO Mike Zafirovski made bullish comments about the VoIP business. There is a particular focus on software – Avaya is spending 70% of its R&D budget on software, for example.
Nortel, meanwhile, is also focused on developing software for the enterprise market. Zafirovski said 80% of Nortel’s 12,000 engineers and researchers are software programmers. He said a high-profile agreement with Microsoft is a key element of Nortel’s goal to become more software-centric. “Though the image of Nortel may be as a hardware company,” he said, “we’re making software solutions to drive [business innovation].” Source:TechWorld.
This ought to throw a bucket of cold water on the ol’ VoIP fire. I wonder if the patent infringements could extend to the enterprise in bypass scenarios?
asdf
VOIP is just a more efficient way of delivering the same old telephone service we used for the past 100 years. It’s only advantage is lower cost, which generally means lower revenues for everybody.
many
adsf:
I agree to a certain extent. VoIP is reinventing the same old PSTN circuit switched network within the cloud. This is true for cisco, avaya and nortel.
That said the long term view of unified communications/applications is a real revenue possibility. The integration of streaming medias (voice and video) with gaming, location based and so call presence services has the potential to make revenues for the provider soar along with the applications being broadly adopted by the end user. I also see great potential for integration with next generation telematics and mobile computing. The fundamental difference being that the applications drive the network from the edge, rather than the other way around.
These possibilities are being seized by vendors, some more than others.
The question is can the leadership of nortel put aside their greed and corruption in time to take advantage of it? Will they stop polishing the turd? Can they stop feeding milk to the cash cows? Can they play nice with other vendors? Can they stop making huge PR gaffs and start marketing their considerable talents? Can they actually promote and retain visionary leadership rather that the current crop? Can they actually report earnings on time without restating them with negative revelations? Can they make a sale in the developing world and still make a profit?
If history is any judge the answer is no.
I argue that nortel is too big and product diverse. It amounts to a “planned economy” ala the soviet union. This sort of company can be barely managed in a relatively stable market, but given the dynamic telecom industry right now, it is impossible.
BTW I argue the same circumstances for Alcatel-Lucent and Siemens
The psychiatrist
many,
Current management’s ability to get everyone in the company on the “same page”,there is defintely a fire burning under the top execs in which Mike Z himself has personally recruited.Many of them have left other prominent positions to join Mike in working at turning Nortel around,I believe the efforts of his team are genuine in that should they fail there may be a blemish that can’t be shaken off ie; mainly Mike Z himself- remember “failure is not an option”- more sincere words were never spoken from a CEO who started at 50/50 at best.
No question Mike Z is the real deal,what remains to be seen however is how well he can transcend his drive and determination throughout the entire company,although I do believe that it will happen,however the speed at which it happens will be crucial in determining whether or not Nortel becomes a market force in the constant changing world of telecom.
Nortel cto’s keep trying to drive the applications part into lower and lower layers. John even admits “Clearly the primitives are there …..” but her doesn’t see the advantage for his company “……..”…….but are they designed and implemented in a way and by people that assumed they would be foundational capabilities of higher layer applications? Again, the answer is no.” Roese offers no clarification on his assertion. What exactly is not acceptable to make-before-break and hold connection John? What besides connection primitives do you want at the “communications network” layer? What exactly are you whining about?
How exactly can Service Oriented Architectures be “leveraging the interplay” John? what is your specific criticism of .net or Websphere?
A big “duh” on the GPS services there John, but how widely deployed is the needed AGPS infrastructure. What exactly is nortel doing about it?
Yeah, sure it is a megatrend….or not. Who cares? What exactly is nortel doing about it? If nortel does do something (a big if…), then how exactly are you going to get it to market and what exactly are you going to do to promote it?
The bottom line John is *deliverables* What are nortels deliverables and when?
http://techiqmag.com/topics/voip/ The VAR Guy
Look out, Nortel. The open source crowd and Asterisk may sneak up on you and Cisco:
I don’t know whether to hoot in derision or look away in embarrassment. Nortel (and most other telecom equipment firms) have been software-centric for 10 or even 20 years, but it’s taken until now for a CEO to realize it? Ironically, Nortel had internal, proprietary software technologies in the mid-1980s that were superior to anything available commercially until well into the 1990s. They could have taught Microsoft (and the rest of the computing industry) a lot about software, but now they think the situation has reversed. Sic transit gloria. The software visionaries of 25 years ago were gradually supplanted by those who believed that PowerPoint picture-books of network and product architectures were more important to success. Indeed, I would wager that a serious erosion in software design excellence was responsible, as much as anything else, for debacles like Neptune. Nortel has apparently lost something that used to be a key competitive advantage. Good luck getting it back. If it returns, it won’t be because of Microsoft, but because of a management team that understands the importance of software excellence and fosters a culture in which it can re-emerge.
many
texpat, right you are! The proprietary processors and compilers of the 80s were superior to crisco and microsloth. Protel was superior to C. Far too much software was written around proprietary hardware though. Even multi-core and ENET were remarkable feats, with mult-threaded processing and changing the SOS that ran the scheduler for so long (and so well). Those were the glory days of BNR
Once nortel took over (and worse Bay/synaptics/wellfleet) it was downhill very fast. Neptune was a boondoggle extraordinaire just like Preside, GSF and “Protel restructuring”. I venture a guess that the mis-management of those projects by the boneheaded executive MBAs did more to sink the ship than people will ever know. I know their behaviours disgusted and amazed me.
Nortel would be a great company again if only they could get that powerpoint to C++ code generator working!
Is VoIP Sexy Again?
With all the focus on video, IP-TV and Google-YouTuben acquisition, VoIP has gone from belle of the ball to shrinking violet. The reality, however, is VoIP is still very much alive and well. All you have to do is look at Vonage’s growth, the fact Skype has now had its software downloaded more than 500 million times, and North American cablecos are aggressively pushing into the telephone business.
This is proving to be good news for Avaya and Nortel, which have taken a head’s down approach to VoIP. At the VoiceCon conference Avaya CEO Louis D’Ambrosio and Nortel CEO Mike Zafirovski made bullish comments about the VoIP business. There is a particular focus on software – Avaya is spending 70% of its R&D budget on software, for example.
Nortel, meanwhile, is also focused on developing software for the enterprise market. Zafirovski said 80% of Nortel’s 12,000 engineers and researchers are software programmers. He said a high-profile agreement with Microsoft is a key element of Nortel’s goal to become more software-centric. “Though the image of Nortel may be as a hardware company,” he said, “we’re making software solutions to drive [business innovation].”
Source: TechWorld.