Path Cleared for Ciena-MEN Deal

Time to change the name of this board to "Much Ado About Nothing." With apoligies to Wil and anybody else who may have beat me to this "obviety." ;>)

What if Mike Z writes a best-selling how-to book to a la Case? Then we'll all look like the hacks we are, exposed to ridicule here and everywhere.

Quiz time. Who said: "We've got fresh CienaMEN bums to get you into our holiday spirit" ?

Something fishy here. I agree with NSN, they had the better deal. Why wouldn't they just do the stalking horse to begin with, but be prepared to bid to their limit. They'd at least had walked about with $20M, or so, for being the stalking horse.

Yeah, I mean, what's a paltry $41M in the overall scheme of things.

WHEN will this stock OFFICIALLY be declared WORTHLESS? Anybody?

it already is. what more do you expect.

In fact, the difference for creditors is only $20 millions(NSN winning would have meant a penalty of $21 million to be paid to Ciena by Nortel). It also leaves NSN hungry for ........CVAS, may be ???

NSN for CVAS. what a joke that would be?

4 months later and still waiting. This is the way !

http://www.allaboutnortel.com/2009/08/14/sonus-...

why do you think it is a joke?

go figure. no synergy. legacy almost obsolete stuff. no upgrad portfolio. no guts to buy. handful of kryptonite.

''Nortel CVAS has consistently ranked as the number one supplier in the carrier VoIP market since 2002. According to Infonetics Research's recent report, Service Provider VoIP Equipment and Subscribers Market Share, Size, and Forecasts - 2Q09, Nortel kept its global leadership position for carrier softswitches with 30.2 percent market share. Furthermore, according to Infonetics, during the second quarter of 2009, Nortel kept its position as the dominant softswitch supplier in both North America and EMEA. According to Dell'Oro, Nortel has consistently been ranked as the #1 Global Carrier VoIP and Softswitch leader since 2002. Nortel CVAS has customer deployments in all continents with leading carriers and provides VoIP solutions to two thirds of IDC's worldwide listing of top 20 carriers (by revenue).''

http://www.articlesbase.com/business-articles/n...

if one were to believe that nortel was #1 in every business as it claims then one would wonder why they went bankrupt.

CVAS #1
Optical #1
GSM-R #1
Enterprise Voice #1
MSS #1

yeah yeah whatever.

Most here aren't knowledgeable enough about the industry to understand your post. Lots of posers and competitors who really don't understand the portfolio. Nortel CVAS is, and has always been, the world leader and beater. The rest are very far behind. This really is Nortel's crown jewel. It's unfortunate that they have to sell this unit under Chpt11, as they will not get what it's worth. It's worth a shit-load of money, but they will only get a fraction of the value. Many world firsts with this unit that the other companies copied, but anyone who has worked for Nortel knows its stellar past and the absolute lead this unit had. Very sad. I hope it goes for the most money of all the units so far. It truly deserves it.

drink the cool aid and drown in it

Hmmm, hmmm - that's some goooood kool-aid!!!

As heir to DMS, CVAS is the once-and-current cash cow for Nortel, setting the bar that all the others strive in vain for: first in digital switching and now in Carrier VoIP. Note that while the only ones you'll hear claiming that the other divisions are #1 are Nortel execs, CVAS has been ranked #1 by independent research based on actual market position (as opposed to bonus-inflating b.s.)...

The people who ran Nortel into the ground did not know what they had in the division that became CVAS, all they knew is that they didn't want to sell big contracts to a handful of carrier customers globally anymore (too much kowtowing for egos that large), they wanted to sell smaller contracts to a larger group of smaller enterprise customers, who would individually wield less clout. And we all know how well that strategy worked out...

So like teleguy said, the folks who really know the carrier industry, as opposed to the enterprise industry or stock markets in general, know the true value of CVAS, its people and its solutions, when compared against its direct competition.

I'm sorry that your Nortel experience has been so painful (mine has been no picnic either), and I can completely understand your extremely low opinion of Nortel's so-called leaders, but CVAS was, is, and always will be Nortel's true crown jewel. And that's not just the kool-aid talking...

Like all things Nortel of any value, including former employees like yourself, the current leadership failed to recognize or capitalize on that value - that's the tragedy here. A truly amazing cocktail of hubris and ignorance destroyed literally billions of dollars of value which we labored so long and hard to build up. Very sad indeed...

I think CVAS portfolio is good but they made some development mistakes on the CS2K . They are-

They developed border control point instead of Session border Controller. Missed a trick here, who wants to manage firewalls in parallel to the media border? ACME took off in a steller way, Nortel eventualy had to partner with SBC vendors to supply them. Should have made their own.

2) they focus so much development on Geo-res for instant failover. Yet dark fibre needed for this over 200km is too expensive unless you own your own.. Should have developed it to run over a higher latency network.

3) the CS2K software releases keep slipping out. They talked about 3 release per year but it stays at two.

4) Its too friggin complicated to upgrade. Large ones can take weeks of night work.

5) it's too complex to configure. It's all disjointed. many different places to configure for one service. Invest in decent wizards. I dont want to have to log into 3 separate systems to provision one new IP customer on it!

6) The documentation was severely poor, even today half of it refers to DMS. New component docs are fine, they should have cleaned up the old disjointed documents.

7) early insistance on ers8600 inclusion really got carriers backs up. See the bigger picture and support Cisco for those devices. I think you do now but it shodl have been 7 years ago..

"rts force" was all it used to take

I just want it to succeed against all the odds that Nortel has piled high against it and everything else.

Its somewhat out of character for Nortel to turn down a chance to pay a penalty as time-honored foreplay, of sorts, to the climax of exec bonuses.

- CienaMEN bun

not that Nortel has integrated any of their businesses successfully.

"Among a myriad of issues, no one on Ciena's management team has ever been involved in integrating a business of this size much less acquired a business out of bankruptcy"

All Nortel has to do is hum "Come Together"

The Nortel "management team" they acquired will be more than happy to help!