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Another Nortel Blog
By Mark Evans | October 23, 2007
This may not be news for many of you but I just noticed that Nortel has another corporate blogger. A fellow named Phil Edholm is writing a blog called “Enterprise Technology”.
Not sure about Edholm’s title but he describes himself as being responsible for technology vision, strategy, and architecture across the enterprise product portfolio. Given Nortel’s focus on the enterprise business, this sounds like a pretty key position.
Just for fun, I’d like to see a contest between Edholm and his fellow Nortel blogger, John Roese, to see who can write the most posts over the next month.
Topics: Blogs |
October 23rd, 2007 at 3:46 pm
Welcome..to me or you….it is nice to hear from you.
As an aside, I am the Chief Technologist and VP Network Architecture for enterprise. I report to Joel Hackney in his role as the President of the Nortel Enterprise business. I have been with Nortel for almost 12 years and have driven VoIP, the Bay merger, and a number of otehr tec hnologiesw and products in the enterprise side. As you can find on my bio on the blog, I am a Californian and have been driving networking and communications technologies for almost 25 years and am focused on the enterprise issues of Hyperconnectivity.
In the Enterprise Technology blog I will discuss key industry and customer issues as well as bringing forward architectural and technology information that are of interest to our enterprise customers. I hope you had an opportunity to read some of my posts and comment.
While a blog post competition with John might be interesting, I think we are in fact working together to communicate Nortel’s vision for both the telecommunications industry as well as the enterprise segment. I certainly have a goal of quality over volume, but try to get at least 2 posts per week.
Look forward to interacting with you in the future!!!!!
October 23rd, 2007 at 4:36 pm
Phil:
Thanks for providing some more background. I’m looking forward to reading you blog.
Mark
October 23rd, 2007 at 9:09 pm
Nortel needs a lot more Phil Edholms, in my opinion. Phil understands the enterprise technology world inside and out. He’s conversant with today’s challenges but can switch gears to discuss what needs to happen ten years from now.
I’ve watched Phil participate in industry debates in which he shredded his counterparts from Cisco and Avaya. What is Phil’s secret? It’s very simple. He knows what he’s talking about just about all the time and when he doesn’t he doesn’t pretend to.
October 24th, 2007 at 9:35 am
I was on a lot of conference calls with Phil and met with him a couple of times on the subject of Optical Ethernet in the late 1990’s. He always impressed me as a person of vision and more importantly integrity.
Phil, is one jewel that stayed after the Bay merger (although as I pointed out Wellfleet and Synoptics were hardly on the same page before the merger). He has a way of dispelling religiosity in the room and cutting through the crap to the right decision ™ pretty quickly. Simplicity is a very hard thing to maintain during a merger when people are trying to entrench their way of doing things. Even harder when the company is under stress and retreating into it’s comfort zone. I imagine even now nortel suffers from some pretty cutthroat internal competition between product managers.
Phil, in my estimation, did a good job of bring people together and might have pulled it off on the enterprise side if the bottom hadn’t fallen out.
I honestly hope Phil can maintain a vision on the enterprise side and promote the somewhat technically superior nortel product line. I think the OE stuff was ahead of it’s time but companies that needed to build out the MAN such as Yipes, Telseon, Sigma, Muse and the like were not able to gain traction to offer GigE in the PMSA’s (NFL cities) and provide the needed competition to MCI (VzBiz) and at&t for their own enterprise VPLS services. Following the market a bit it looks like the pieces are in place now, and it seems as if the big guys are under a lot more pressure.
Phil still has a mighty tough row to hoe with the management and marketing decisions that have been further damaged the brand. I wish him luck building a business with the likes of JJ
(how’s that six-sigma religion going there pal?)
October 24th, 2007 at 2:18 pm
Wow…I think I am blushing. Thanks for the generous comments.
As to the Lean Six Sigma religion, while I am not yet an acolyte, I am converted……
While I am not directly tied into operations, as part of the enterprise management team I have had some Lean Six Sigma (L6S) training to be a champion/leader. After going through about 4 days of focused training, I am a convert in that, when properly applied, L6S definitely has the capability to transform Nortel. It is important to note that in addition to EE and ME, part of my undergrad was spending about a year plus as an IE major, so I have a lot of past experience in the manufacturing/process side (I worked for GM for about 10 years early on and they paid my way through University).
In the L6S leaders training, we did an exercise where a “process” was run that failed and then as a team we were to follow the L6S process to re-define it (DMAIC - Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control). It turned out that by looking at the process, it was possible to “jump” to the end optimized solution (for some of us that have jump logic), but most could not see the path that easily. The conclusion I came to is that what L6S does is define a repeatable process that allows a relatively wide group of people to get to the “right” answer to a process/operational challenge.
The way I relate this to others is to think of a sheet of paper with a thousand small dots on it. A small percentage of the population can look at the sheet and see through the thousand dots to a pattern represented by 20 specific dots. The problem is that if this small group are the only ones that can solve problems and make improvements it is very limiting. The DMAIC process enables a L6S trained Black Belt to work through a process that eliminates 8-900 of the dots so the pattern becomes clear. For example, using Prado analysis to identify the primary causes of variation enables focus on the real critical components versus people guessing based on their “experience”. The result is a repeatable path to optimization of processes.
Obviously, for every dollar of improvement that can be generated a significant percentage can drop to the bottom line. And I am comfortable that there are significant opportunities for improvement in our processes and that the L6S teams are competent to identify and optimize.
While L6S has great advantages, it is not a replacement for the “jump innovation” that makes for discontinuities and we are careful that you can not make everything a pure process, but need to enable innovative thought as well.
In conclusion, I believe that this process will make us stronger and more capable to drive our products and value propositions into the market.
October 24th, 2007 at 7:11 pm
Thanks for sharing that with us Phil.
we look forward to more interacting with you.