DJK

Nortel Looking at 3 Serious Bids for Metro Ethernet Business

There are essentially 4 main business divisions at Nortel; Enterprise, Optical, Wireless, and Wireline. Since the days of Roth, Enterprise was always the ugly, redheaded step child. Nortel identified itself with the other divisions because those businesses reflected the company's origin (Carrier).

But even in neglect, Enterprise has always been a break even to slightly profitable division for Nortel. All the other divisions have been loss centers since the Internet bust in '01 (especially Wireline). The lure and promise of "billion dollar deals" was just to enticing for Nortel to ignore. So Nortel continuously pumped money into these losing endeavors in the hopes for the "big pay-off."

But Nortel needs money now. They can't afford to wait for the big pay-off. The Enterprise market overall is a larger market with a much more diverse customer base. So it's more stable and the margins are far better. Which is exactly what Nortel needs right now.

Now the interesting part will be if the Enterprise division proves successful now Nortel will focus on it. Or will that cause it to start failing too.

Nortel: Is it Time for a Change At the Top?

Nortel bought Bay, not the other way around. And Nortel's bureaucratic style culture now dominates not Bay's. I know because I lived through it all. We went from a customer focused, productive environment to a process driven, multi-layered bureaucracy, where the common sentiment is to "hide" from the customer.


On Oct 07 06:55 PM Empathy wrote:

> I believe the demise of Northern Telecom was when it was taken over
> by Bay Networks. Until that merger disaster it was a terrific place
> to work, but, today it is the worst place to work. Why would anyone
> invest in a company where its employees are so un-happy, they hope
> for a lay-off package? All you have to do is compare the insider
> transactions to see management getting their fat bonuses. While the
> employees get little more than stress-related mental break-downs
> for being over worked while their saleries loose ground to cost of
> living as they work from round to round of lay-offs.
>
> If anything, Nortel should be the key business school example of
> how to ruin a company and demoralize employees...