“New Nortel partners joining Avaya will be fast-tracked with programs and incentives to enable them to quickly deliver Avaya’s innovative unified communications and contact center solutions to new small, medium and large businesses around the globe,” Avaya said in a press release.

Todd Abbott, senior vice president and president, Field Operations, said the new program offers Nortel partners the opportunity to add the Avaya product line, including the new Avaya Aura unified communications product, to their portfolios.

“We are taking unified communications and contact center markets into new territory with one of the most innovative, core communications platforms available today,” he said. “This is an opportunity to quickly build a relationship with Avaya and gain new business with customers looking to move their infrastructures to the most advanced architectural model.”

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Case in point is Aruba, which has offered special prices to Nortel customers to migrate to its wireless management suite. Some of the other vultures include Enterasys and F5 Networks, while Juniper is aggressively going after Nortel’s resellers.

F5 said last week that Nortel’s Alteon customers can get trade-in credits and customized consulting services if they migrate

F5′s program is aimed at customers and resellers of Nortel’s Alteon application switches. The company is offering trade-in credits up to $9,000 toward replacements, as well as customized consulting services if they move to F5′s BIG-IP Application Delivery Controllers.

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“We believe recent reports that Nortel is contemplating bankruptcy are likely to force its enterprise channel to look for new alternatives,” Kidron said in a recent report. “With roughly $600M-$700M in quarterly enterprise revenue, we believe Nortel’s enterprise business could deteriorate faster than its carrier business. We expect competitors to aggressively poach Nortel’s channels and enterprise business.”

Earlier this month, Channel Web reported that Juniper was wooing Nortel’s partners. In a letter to Nortel partnership, Frank Vitagliano, Juniper’s senior VP of worldwide channels says:

“At Juniper Networks, we understand it can be challenging to navigate the current business landscape while continuing to add value to your customers. In today’s troubled climate, you may have concerns about your continued ability to provide high-performance networking solutions to your customers. We want to help.”

In a letter to Nortel partnership, Frank Vitagliano, Juniper’s senior VP of worldwide channels says:

“At Juniper Networks, we understand it can be challenging to navigate the current business landscape while continuing to add value to your customers. In today’s troubled climate, you may have concerns about your continued ability to provide high-performance networking solutions to your customers. We want to help.”

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Cisco had put together five videos, which are cheeky but leave no doubt about Cisco’s intention to debunk Nortel’s claims. Here’s the first of the five videos, which were put together by “Career Limiting Productions”.

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Ellen Daley, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc., told PC World that Motorola had to do something. “They have to do something at Motorola,” she said. “They are losing market share, they are bleeding and they are inefficient. Job cuts happen when you are not making enough money to support the jobs.”

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But after listening to Zafirovski’s speech last week to the troops, one thing that cropped up is whether all the strategizing and maneuvering is a moot point? Think about it, Nortel has come a long way in the past three years in recovering from an accounting scandal, streamlining operations, selling non-core business units, and pursuing a new strategic course.

Only time will tell if all these efforts bear fruit but Nortel’s future may also be out of the hands of Nortel’s executives and employees. No matter how many right decisions are made, the economic and competitive landscape may be difficult for Nortel to overcome.

Doing business in the telecom equipment market is tough – competition is fierce and, arguably, there’s too much of it; margins are tight, and customers are being cautious after going through a long period of being pragmatic.

To succeed, you need to be a well-oiled, focused machine with the products in the right place at the right time. That’s a tall order for any company, especially one competing in the telecom equipment market.

That said, I’m hoping Nortel survives and somehow thrives. It’s a company that has been already for more than 100 years, it has a long history of innovation, and employs thousands of Canadians, many of them within the R&D ranks.

Call me an optimist but I’m also a realist so we’ll see how things transpire.

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According to ABIresearch, Cisco edged out Nortel and HP when it came to evaluating “network switching vendors’ internal green initiatives as well as the greenness of their switches”.

ABI said Nortel has the “greenest switches” – “Its switches have been optimized for low power consumption. While Nortel’s power consumption tool is far from perfect, it does offer network managers a useful way of examining power consumption across several different vendors’ products.”

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Are there going to be winners and losers over the next few months as carriers and corporate customers deal with more pressure on IT budgets?

Will an economic slowdown allow Cisco to take advantage of rivals’ struggles to gain an even bigger competitive foothold?

Who’s going to win? Who’s going to lose?

What do you think?

Update: Ericcson is expected to post a 40% decline in third-quarter operating profits compared with a year earlier, according to the Times Online. Apparently, Ericsson is hurting because the “lucrative network replacement and upgrade work drying up in Europe as telecoms companies tighten their belts”.

Meanwhile, Cisco laid off 129 employees earlier this week as part of a move to close its broadband telephony services unit.

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Cisco CEO John Chambers said the company has “never been more comfortable” with its long-term growth goals of 12% to 17%. His bullishness is based on the Internet’s growth and Cisco’s move into new technology markets.

Source: Reuters

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