Some Insight into Web.Alive

The Nortel Chainsaw Massacre

how web.alive as one of the non core projects took up resources resulting in nortel.dead

Coming soon in a quarter near you. Best drama and slapstick comic management with guaranteed in-Action of 2009.

removed

Mark, your advertisements are overlapping with the text of your blogs/comments, at least in firefox... (the advertisement on the left hand side).

Could somebody comment on Nortel's web.alive vs. Google's Lively? Both are/were presented as Second Life - "for Business" (Nortel) and "in a Google Environment" (Google).

Lively was closed last December, a few months after its launch. User interest just didn't seem to be there - http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/lively-no-more.html

How is web.alive different and what makes it viable? Can the two even be compared? Thanks.

I personally think it is more about Market Opportunity than it is about a Product Comparison.

One of the hot topics today is Web Collaboration. There are some very good solutions from Cisco WebEx, Citrix Go-To-Meeting and IBM Lotus Live. These solutions allow people to interact and share information across a browser session such a presentation files, spreadsheets and are effective for group meetings. Their weakness is Audio and Person-to-Person interaction within the group context.

The best piece of technology in Web.alive is the 3D Audio that comes from the DiamondWare acquisition. It allows for multiple audio conversations to occur simultaneously without interrupting the primary speaker.

Think of this in a real life example such as a University Lecture Hall. The Professor can present to the large group while quiet side-bar conversations can happen in different corners of the room. In a traditional Audio Bridge, this is impossible to achieve.

I toured around the Lenovo eLounge and saw this in action. There were different groups of people scattered around the eLounge all interacting in their own conversations. Yet I was able to have a 1-on-1 conversation with another person without being interrupted by those other conversations.

As a result of this a clear market opportunity for Web.alive is an eCommerce environment where you can have multiple customers and multiple agents interacting at the same time.

Thanks for your answer, TiC.

wEB ALIE IS A SMALL SMALL.. nOBODY CARES!

WRT "earnings." Anybody else think this company is TOAST?

How about the guys developing it selling it, or the users of the Lenovo site, folks many of Nortel's newer products are using PLM's and business primes to drive sales, using the sales guys as a way to close contracts but not much else. I think the product is GREAT, and shows there IS innovation going on at Nortel in spite of the current leadership team! I wish it was available throughout Nortel to be used as a training tool or meeting tool.

Good post. It was in spite not because of the leadership team. Remember web.alive was one of Roese's pet projects. Its a good example of the non-GE part of Nortel. If the costs of developing web.alive further keep going up, no doubt it will be hacked by the value killer himself, Hackey.

I like this product. It needs more development and I believe it is a small bright spot for Nortel's future if they can survive. If someone else picks this technology up, it would be a good platform to build future applications on.

I like this product too, but not in Nortel. It's too far from Nortel's core businesses and Nortel is not adept at moving into adjacent markets. Right now, Nortel needs to get it's core business and strategies in order, not dabble in emerging stuff without a clear business model.

If Nortel thinks this is truly a space they want to be involved in, they should spin it out and let it run as an independent entity so it can be free of the luddites running Nortel. They should operate it the way a VC would.

This is web.alive:

Nortel is a recognized leader in delivering communications capabilities that make the promise of Business Made Simple a reality for our customers. Our next-generation technologies, for both service provider and enterprise networks, support multimedia and business-critical applications. Nortel's technologies are designed to help eliminate today's barriers to efficiency, speed and performance by simplifying networks and connecting people to the information they need, when they need it. Nortel does business in more than 150 countries around the world.

Who is going to sell web.alive? The carrier sales people -no. The enterprise distributors - no. 1 800 Nortel - no. Looks like another idea with no business sense behind it.

How about the Nortel Enterprise sales people that already talk to thousands of customers around the world? An Enterprise Sales person obviously talked with Lenovo for them to make a purchase.

Nice try though at totally bogus FUD.

Sorry about the belated comment but do you really think Lenovos use of Web.Alive is the result of a real sales effort? Let me remind you that Steve Bandrozak - current head of Enterprise Sales in the Americas was Lenovo's CIO just prior to him joining Nortel in 2007. That said, the diamondware technology used is superb and I think could be a real differentiator in some of the more conventional conferencing and UC apps.

The same enterprise folks that sell over 10,000 other enterprise SKU's like PBX's, terminals, routers, services, etc.? You think they are a good channel to market for web.alive? I dealt with the Nortel channels and they are great at selling the old stuff, great at selling big deals to big customers, and great at working with distributors. They are not good and not incented to sell small innovative products that are unlike anything they sell today. Web.alive is too small, too innovative, too unique to fit with Nortel: its operations or sales force. It is also too small to save Nortel.

BTW, just because someone has a point of view different does not mean it is FUD.

OK, not FUD, just more senseless bashing as usual. You do know that Nortel has a dedicated Global Accounts team that talks to the largest customers that spend Millions per year around the world. You do understand that this team takes orders direct and supplies direct without any distributor right?

If theres there such a thing as senseless bashing then there must also be sensible bashing. Does it not invariably include global warming -sorry, climate change?

Nortel has done a good job of developing certain products over the years.

Nortel has done a horrendous job of marketing/selling those same products.

Call 1-800-4-Nortel some time and act like a typical customer off the street. Say that you would like to place an order for web.alive(or telepresence, or some of the other more sophisticated products). See how long it takes you to get solid information.

Nortel's biggest problem is not the lack of products to sell. The problem is that control of the company has been seized by bean counters, operations people, and engineers. Unfortunately the people calling most of the shots have no sense of sales, customers, entrepreneurship......... Unless/until that ever gets corrected it won't matter what type of product innovations come along. Nortel will still be toast.

First and foremost a business should be run like a business. For Nortel to put operations people in charge of running sales was a self issued death warrant.

Sick_Sigma: I tend to agree. Majority of Nortel Operations folks are given high remarks if they can do one thing correct, that is escalate and create a lot of noise. Starts at the top with the Technical support and operations VP, who are old school folks that want to rule based on intimidation. Typcially most discussions with the operations team end up with them bringing up their senior VP and VP name as way to intimidate you and get their way.

Yeah .. you sound like Joel Hackney. If everything was left on Sales, they would have sold this company long back ago. Do you know why Nortel pulled back from Services?

Why did Nortel pulled back from Services? enlighten me?