Did Microsoft Go Wrong?

Nortel is the #1 in VoIP technology, so it is not a wrong decision choosing Nortel as a partner..
Microsoft's most strategic unified communications partner is Nortel, a company facing yet another fiscal crisis. But this chrisis should not change the position of Nortel in the VoIP market share..

Microsoft gained the technology and experience. Nortel did not gain much. With the footprint and its branding, Microsoft can dump Nortel and move to other players. It is already partnered up with Cisco.

Nortel could have got some big bucks had it sold the enterprise division to Microsoft. They would have bought it in a blink of an eye.

probably not… but Shell is comfortable in using it in their Oil operations….

there will always be space for NT, Avaya etc but the chunk of the revenue are not coming from hospitals nor the mission critical customers (the banks are really considering OCS very strongly for their branches, thats where the volume is)

The UC revenue will grow but not as an additional investment but rather as a replacement of revenue from the current investments, thus there will be another player to whom the pie has to be shared. In addition to that the price per port on what we know as telephony will dramatically go down, putting pressure on HW based solutions…margins?

it is a matter of time…. tic-tac

“Would you feel safe and comfortable at a hospital that runs their mission critical voice network on Windows Server and Vista?” – Yes, if the solution has the right redundancy design. High availability systems assume that individual components will fail and these systems are designed to ensure that failures won't impact the service. Microsoft has hired a bunch of Nortel's senior Carrier VoIP team so Microsoft has the expertise in-house. Most importantly, they have the right people to go toe-to-toe with any customer or analyst in a discussion on the subject of reliable solutions. In fact, Microsoft is probably in better shape than Nortel for that kind of discussion because Nortel has visibly failed to benefit from removing the silos between the portfolios. I bet the Nortel Enterprise team would never consider talking to their Carrier counterparts.

Nortel is #1 in WHAT? VoIP technology? Are you kidding me? The last major vendor to get a SIP phone and an architecture based on the 30-year old Meridian Option 11C that is, at best, hybrid?

Its likely that Microsoft decided to partner with Nortel because Nortel was the only leading PBX vendor willing to stick its neck out to closely partner its product with a potential competitor. Avaya, Cisco and others were more interested in rolling out their own UC solutions instead of trying to piggy back on Microsoft.

Microsoft is the big gainer of the relationship. It leveraged Nortel's installed base of CS1K and telephony background to gain a foothold in the market. Nortel comes out only with some fuzzy hopes of gaining business in the already crowded and hyper competitive network services space and custom software development. Furthermore, by starving its already tight R&D and SG&A budgets to promote the partnership, Nortel has fallen even further behind in developing its own UC solutions and shoring up its own aging CS1K base.

Ironically, one of the results of this partnership could well be that the Nortel CS1K ends up becoming the first PBX made obselete by Microsoft's OCS R2.

MSFT chose Nortel because of the large installed base and the fact that most of that is in the US where MS is strongest. It just made sense. But now that MS has shown its hand to be a software pbx, a la asterisk, I think that partnership will go by the wayside. MSFT has its foot in the door and doesn't really need Nortel anymore.

Sorry, you both are right.
I mean that C-VoIP..
Do not judge me just for one letter…

i would add that there are several people and execs that got compensated and rewarded for the HALO sales… which were nothing different than selling upgrades to the existing installed base on the basis that the customer made the decision based on the alliance…difficult to prove but anyway were recorded as alliance sales…lots of people saw they paychecks get fat because of this

MS has never partnered without transferring technology to themselves. This is how they partner and this is how they train their partner-ers. It should be no surprise the Nortel partnership has resulted in MS gaining technical advantage – that is what they do. If this was not understood by Nortel day 1, then that is tragic.

While we're talking about trolls in a separate post, there are several factual errors in some of the comments posted below.

Most importantly, a commenter below ironically called “fact” incorrectly claims that Nortel's alliance with Microsoft will end in a few months. That is absolutely wrong. Nortel and Microsoft entered into a *four* year alliance in July 2006. That is clearly stated in the original alliance release here: http://tinyurl.com/ntht3

Unfortunately, this misinformation has now been picked up and reported in another publication here: http://tinyurl.com/6zpfx3

Also – “The Left Behind” says there has been no jointly developed product. Nortel and Microsoft worked together to fully integrate Microsoft UC capabilities into the Nortel SR 4134 branch router. Earlier this year, we jointly issued this press release highlighting new joint solutions to-date: http://tinyurl.com/5nyylg

My intent was not to mislead, thank you for the correction.

Bo, Other than the error in the timeline, all what I listed are facts: this 1 Billion promise of far from being tracked publicly. No one knows yet if NT made a strategic error by allowing MCSFT get to the market faster. It is also a fact that MCSFT dependence on another PBX will be removed as they progress with OCS. Also, the NT-IBM joint work on the expense of the MCSFT relation was also clear in the trade shows where Nortel shows much more focus on IBM applications. Finally, the departure of Steve Slatery to Cisco is also a fact. He was the only Nortel leader who managed and grew a business to a billion dollar business. And Z just did not find a place for him.

AMEN!! Well said