Nortel has filed for bankruptcy protection in both Canada and the United States today, hoping to stave off a complete collapse. The telephony and networking hardware vendor has been struggling for years with shrinking market share and less than spectacular improvements in their products. That adds up to a bad situation for any company and it seems to have finally caught up to Nortel.
I was never really a huge fan of their products, either on the network switching or IP Telephony side of things. They were slow to embrace the IP side of the telephony business and I believe that it hurt them in the long run. On the switching side their products were OK but they didn’t really have much that was compelling to compete with the 800 pound gorilla named Cisco.
There could be some huge fallout from this in Redmond, as Microsoft has been teaming with Nortel on much of their Unified Communication platform. There is very tight integration between the vendors and I believe that Microsoft is leveraging Nortel technology in some of their voice mail products, among other things. There is certainly enough spare cash in Redmond to buy out Nortel at this point – something I thought might happen a couple years ago – but it seems that it is still not to be. Maybe now that Nortel is truly on the ropes Microsoft will step in and save their UC investments.
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