 "I can take a certain amount of creative marketing; e.g. how many vendors claim leadership in any given area," said Tony Rybczynski - Nortel Director of Strategic Enterprise Technologies. |
"However a recent white paper by Cisco titled Reduce Power Consumption Through Integrated Services Delivery is frankly an insult to the intelligence of IT professionals with its intentionally misleading logic."
"Cisco’s mathematically precise, energy consumption comparison of their branch integration solution with the AVERAGE of 6 unnamed competitors, with one or more unnamed appliances (to deliver multi-service functionality), is like saying your favorite team is leading in the division of 10 teams because it has won more games than the average of 6 other teams!"
"Totally meaningless statistic!"
| Cisco 3845 Integrated Services Router | Six Competitor Appliances | |
| Power Consumption (Million W-hr) | 10.32 | 42.34 |
| Cooling Requirements (Million BTU) | 35.21 | 143.54 |
| Carbon Generated (T) | 594 | 2,431 |
"I agree that device consolidation in the branch is very attractive from an opex/capex perspective, and also that environmentally green solutions have both business value and societal benefit."
"However, I believe that enterprises shouldn't be blind-sighted by such deceptive manipulation of facts and look at alternatives."
"Nortel's Secure Router would be one place to start, both from a price/performance and energy efficiency basis."
"I don’t particularly recommend that you read the paper, but I do encourage you to look for the facts on energy efficiencies of different solutions."
Do YOU agree with Tony that the Cisco white paper is an insult to users' intelligence?
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Riposte...
Tony,
I do a lot of presentations at places like Interop and such and always try to take the 'Elder Statesman' role and not pick on our competitors and certainly not call out their deficiencies by name. Certainly the market-share statistics usually do that well enough for us without a lot of help. But let me ask you to rather than spew forth your rhetoric to do me a favor... or in this case some math. As I have stated before it was my worst subject...
Let's pick a few appliances in the branch that are commonly deployed. Let's take a mythical branch office with say 5-60 users, let's even call it an architecture firm for the sake of argument.
I know that you or Phil mentioned your astounding market leadership in the technologically innovative Key System Telephony market segment the other day so we'll add one of those to your Mythical Branch.
We'll put in a security appliance of some sort, please pick your favorite Firewall, VPN, or IDS appliance. Your call, not mine on the vendor, but pick a market leader if you will.
Then we can put some wireless in there. You used to OEM a WiFi controller if I remember, then you changed vendors quickly abandoning your customers (how'd that work out for ya?) We have a pretty neat integrated wireless controller in the ISR that really brings service ubiquity to Wired LAN and Wireless LAN. But notwithstanding this consistency of user experience and operational policy pick your wireless vendor du jour as well.
Now for kicks let's put some WAN Optimization in there. I don't think you have anything like that in your portfolio, not that this is a new concept on this thread. (but check out Matt 7:1 for some good sage advice on how to keep thyself from being too harshly criticized). Obviously you would try to build this as a 'Anybody but Cisco' network as much as you want to. So I think that narrows it down to a company that used to claim to win 98% of the business in this space, but on their last quarterly filing mentioned a very strong competitor enjoying lunch at the same table... so put their WAN optimization externally cabled separate physical box with no integration and full of overlay tunnels in.
Now let's stop here. I could have some fun and throw in separate QoS devices as well, just for kicks, and with those routers its probably necessary... ok, REALLY necessary. But I'll let you make that call.
So Tony you get to add up the following in your mythical branch:
1) Nortel Router (didn't realize they were still made... but ok)
2) WAN Optimization Appliance
3) Security Appliance
4) IP Key System
5) Wireless Controller Appliance
Now when you get done configuring this branch can you post 3 things for me to this site as proof that you have a good understanding of what it takes in the branch:
1) a picture of the logical diagram, IP addressing, VLANs, and cabling necesary to deploy this.
2) The phone number you would call for support. (not two, not three, please just the one number that would be able to support this)
3) and of course the power draw. Realize I am being kind here because I could put a ton more services at ya, but we'll keep it simple...
To start ya off I will of course answer #1 and #2 now....
1) http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/routers/ps5855/prod_small_photo0900aecd80172903.jpg
There is a good picture of our recommended deployment for this integrated branch. It has a very complex cabling design s you can see....
2) I usually recommend 1-800-GO-CISCO as in the US and Canada it's easy to remember, and is consistently rated the top service and support organization in the industry and could easily handle the extremely complex deployment of #1 above that Tony highlights...
Let me know how the deployment goes...
dg
Nortel kneejerk response...
Douglas,
Well put.
Unfortunately, I'll need to keep this response anonymous, as a necessary adjunct to self preservation...
What world are you living in?
Tony,
What world are you living in? Most customers I know wouldn't put ALL of there applications in one box, that is true. However, they will put multiple applications into a box if it makes sense.
If we look at what company is best positioned to do that, there is actually only one company. That is Cisco. Please disagree with me on this point, and offer me a rebuttal, i'd love to hear it.
Lets look at the applications that we could put into a Cisco ISR.
- Routing
- Switching (NM Based Switching Modules W/ POE)
- Firewall
- Wireless
- Voice (T1/E1, FXS, FXO, E&M, BRI, Conferencing, Transcoding)
- Session Border Controller
- H.323 Gatekeeper
- IP Key System (CME)
- IP Voice Survivability (SRST)
- Caching (ACNS)
- Application / Network Acceleration (WAAS)
- VPN (Built in Hardware Acceleration)
- H.320 Video Gateway
- Built in IVR Functionality (CVP)
- More WAN Interfaces then I can think of, including options that are very niche.. (3G Wireless, VSAT, DSL, Etc)
I'm sure thats only about 20% of the applications. I'm sure there is more as well. What can the "Nortel Secure Router" do? As far as I know..
- Route (only IP)
- VPN
- Switching
- Some WAN Interfaces..
- Firewall?
- Some vague roadmap to voice enablement?
Also, there is only 1 box that can do this.. How many different ISR models are there?
Listen, at the end of the day, there is something to be said about not putting all of your eggs in one basket. It's not the right solution for every customer. However, there is 2 points that you need to keep in mind before spouting off with marketing propoganada.
- Customers like options. They may not use every service in a ISR, but atleast they have the option to pick and choose what they can use.
- Those that live in glass houses shouldn't throw rocks. It's easy to pick on Cisco (market leader), but what has Nortel done in the market that is innovative in this field? What products do they have to show? One crippled "Secure Router" that barely has baseline features, and no installed base doesnt really count. As far as "Roadmap" goes, i'd be carefull how much you tout that. Time and Time again Nortel is late to the market, with inferior products that show little or no innovation.
It's not just my opinion.. The industry, and the market sees it.. A stock price of $.64C (Not counting the 10:1 reverse stock split) should be proof enough for you.
How does this answer the
How does this answer the original point regarding the dubious comparison stats? If there are real numbers there to back up the company's claims then let's see them...
Stop the madness!!!!
I read this news story here, http://www.wral.com/business/local_tech_wire/news/story/2494347/ and was curious if Nortel was retaining the services of people who do nothing all day but trash-talk vendors who seem to get a lot more done in the market or was the decision to outsource customer service and engineering while retaining do-nothings?
What do you and Phil Edholm do for a living besides rant about Nortel and get creamed repeatedly by your betters?
Nortel shareholders should demand that you stop, shut up, put your tail between your legs and go home. Then work with your engineers, those that somehow remain, and design an innovative product, service, feature, ANYTHING other than wasting my shareholder dollars on this time investment that does nothing but shows how foolish all of us are for holding on to your shares.
Paul
Tony Rybczynski, Nortel, responds
Users will decide which feature-functionality they need at a branch and choose solutions that meet these needs. For example, most customers aren’t interested in rip and replace strategies for their telephony systems, so we end up spending time with the customer to determine how to best evolve their environment to VoIP and UC and to possibly even to more centralized architectures (vs site-by-site ones).
So don’t expect me to go down the path of designing customer solutions on the fly, in the blogsphere.
Outside of the blogsphere, we are designing networks for customers and have some good momentum (with 33% YoY growth in data networking and security revenues for 2007). See
http://blog.tmcnet.com/the-hyperconnected-enterprise/business-aspects/nortel-enterprise-is-rocking.asp
What is clear, and Ingrid commented on this as well, enterprises need the facts… the facts on reliability… on performance…. on TCO and, of course, on energy efficiencies.
Is the 33% growth number the
Is the 33% growth number the original or restated number. As I remember NGAP (Nortel General Accounting Principles) only provides accurate numbers sometime after the fact.
Check here for more accurate numbers...
Here is the Nortel statement. Not sure where Tony is getting his growth numbers because the GAAP numbers would be different, to the tune of down a few %.
http://www2.nortel.com/go/news_detail.jsp?cat_id=-8055&oid=100236979&locale=en-US
BE COURAGEOUS NORTEL!
Or as my favorite politician and orator Winston Churchill said, "Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen."
Please sit down, work through the math and don't insult everyone's intelligence with your rhetoric. We showed the numbers in the paper we published, I don't feel there is a need to defend them as we did not want to call out any other vendors for their deficiencies at an architectural level as that would not be appropriately aligned with the 'Elder Statesman' philosophy I outlined.
Have fun in the sandbox. ;)
dg
Rip and Riplace.
Hi Tony,
Just one comment, but the industry and customer base would seem to disagree with you on Rip and Replace. Of course if a customer has a real new PBX they will try to migrate it, but in most cases customers have seen the value in getting away from the legacy gear. I'm sorry to say, Nortel is legacy gear.
If this wasn't the case, then I would think Nortel would be the #1 in Telephony worldwide. They aren't anymore.
http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release.do?id=827039
Nortel has been relegated to a 2nd tier Telephony vendor at this point, behind Cisco and Avaya.