Quite the battle has been brewing between Nortel and Cisco in the following Network World blogs:
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Nortel enterprise director: Cisco insults users' intelligence |
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Cisco Ferrari or Nortel lawn mower, which one will customers choose to ride? |
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Nortel taunts Cisco: Nexus taint no Lexus |
This week the battle heated up even more at VoiceCon Orlando 2008, where Nortel presented their solutions as providing up to seven times the resiliency and about 20 times the performance at up to 50 percent of the total cost of ownership than competing Cisco products, according to independent test reports.
The test reports from The Tolly Group and InfoTech, commissioned by Nortel, tested a head-to-head comparison with Cisco's similar local area network and data center products for unified communications.
Nortel’s end-to-end data networking portfolio is a key component of the company’s Unified Communications strategy, providing the resilient, high-performance infrastructure required for real-time applications, while at the same time improving business productivity.
Nortel also announced enhancements to its mobile unified communications portfolio:
Nortel Infuses Mobile Phones With Powerful Unified Communications Capabilities
Many existing data networks are limited in their ability to support unified communications solutions.
Sub-optimal network reliability and performance in addition to a high cost of ownership compromises the productivity gains and cost savings from unified communications.
Unified communications enable simple, one-click access to phone features such as IM and videoconferencing from the desktop.
 "We chose a Nortel data network solution over other vendors because it delivered superior resiliency, performance and a lower total cost of ownership," said Allan Morris - Executive Director of Information Technology Services at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia. |
"Nortel also understands our business and where we want to take the University in regards to the use of technology in aiding and supporting, teaching, learning and research."
RMIT recently signed a contract with Nortel for the roll-out of a Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) telephony system to replace its 20-year-old PABX model.
 "Network IT buyers increasingly are looking for data networking solutions that don’t restrict them to single-source vendors through proprietary equipment that offers mediocre performance," said Kevin Tolly - President/CEO/Founder of The Tolly Group. |
"Our independent testing shows that Nortel solutions offered superior performance and reliability with a lower cost than other market rivals tested."
"Nortel delivers compelling solutions for users deploying data networks for unified communications."
View more Nortel vs. Cisco Competitive Lab Test Results.
 "This independent testing confirms what thousands of customers already know – that Nortel data solutions are purpose-built for unified communications," said Joel Hackney - President of Nortel Enterprise Solutions. |
"Our mission is to simplify how people communicate."
"Our data network solutions were tested head-to-head against our competitors and came out on top by a large margin."
"These tests underscore that Nortel’s technology delivers communications simplicity while also being the best performing, most reliable and most energy efficient."
As part of Nortel’s commitment to lower energy consumption, the company has introduced the Nortel Energy Efficiency Calculator.
With an energy consumption modeling capability, the calculator helps IT professionals achieve energy reductions of up to 50 percent.
This helps network planners analyze the impact of current or planned network infrastructure deployments to support unified communications.
 "With the growth of IP telephony, Unified Communications, and network virtualization, companies need to be able to analyze consumption trends," said Cindy Borovick - IDC Research Vice President for Datacenter Networks. |
"Nortel's Energy Efficiency Calculator is a proactive tool to understand energy efficiency."
 "Sierra Atlantic is expanding in India and we were looking to deploy a state of the art data network which would cater to our present needs as well as provide us the backbone for our future applications," said Ram Kumar - Director of IT for Sierra Atlantic. |
"We chose a Nortel data network solution after a stringent competitive technical evaluation, which went on for four months."
"The Nortel solution proved to be the most resilient, delivered superior performance, and was the most energy efficient."
"The support competency and commitments were far above any competition."
Do YOU think Nortel is capable of competing head-to-head with Cisco?
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Is the testing objective?
When Vendor A pays for testing against his competition do you expect to see negative results... I am sure alot of test points where Nortel did worse than Cisco where left out of the report. In the end you have to look at alot of places to find the correct information needed to make big purchase.
Nortel will try to stay afloat but Cisco has been gaining in the voice/PBX/Messaging area for some time now.
Brian
Nortel has been bringing
Nortel has been bringing voice solutions to market for more than 100 years. The scientists at Nortel know what it takes to deliver 5 9's reliability and to ensure that the phone works all of the time.
And, so why does the carrier market depend heavily on Nortel? Nortel understands voice and makes data products that are ready willing and able to support Unified Communications. Many think so, including Microsoft and IBM.
Tolly Group.....LOL.........HAHA.........
The problem is that they are still using 100 year old technology and development practices. Nortel should just die, seriously their products are almost as horrible as their support. The only reason Nortel is still around is becuase of their large exisiting TDM base. Everytime Nortel comes out with some product comparison it is from the Tolly Group, and every time they are lining their pockets. Nobody in their right mind is actually going to listen to the Tolly Group.
I really don't care what I buy as long as it works as advertised and is easily supported, unfortunately Nortel no longer meets either of my requirements!
I thought about doing the math...
I read through some of these 'independent reports' and started to sit down tonight to open up a spreadsheet and validate the numbers, find the holes, and with gleeful abandon proceed to engage in a little oratorical fun.
Then it occurred to me that I felt I was being treated unfairly! I mean, how is it that these 'independent testers' were paid significant sums, probably 5-figures or more to 'sponsor' this 'independent' testing and 'validation' by acclaimed industry 'analysts'. Shouldn't I be getting paid by Nortel as well for fact-checking their math? Everyone else is getting paid, why not me? :)
If you are paid for the outcome, and then find the statistics to justify it afterward thats more mercenary than analytical. You may want to read this one... I am sure it will further your analytical capabilities.
dg
its really a profitable job -- fact-checking the cisco solution
This may come as a surprise to you Mr Douglas Gourlay, that fact-checking the cisco solution is a fulltime profession now.
Its always a fun to show my customers hows a supposedly 40 Gig capacity card of 6500 is handicapped by a 48 Mpps forwarding capacity... also its real nice when customer LEARNS that only 2 ports of a 4 port 10 Gig card can be used in case 100% non blocking performance is required.
It is interesting that it always takes a coaxing before cisco offers VSS to datacenter/BigCampus customers. Here also VSS gives a miss on the core-switches and appears only for Distribution switches for "fast L2 converge". Guess VSS is still not up to task to take the role of Core Switches..
OOps.... I was told that Nexus is supposed to take the role of Core switches. Hmmm then what happens to super fast convergence offered by VSS.. guess Cisco thinks that fast convergence is required only @distribution and not at core switches.
Believe me its really a profitable job if you are fact-checking the real cisco solution offering against their marketing billboards.
Interesting but
It is a great fun to read the replies to this and to most of the articles, full of emotions as my father is stronger than your father (stronger on what?) Of course the test results but not the tests are biased - not on purpose but because the results are interpreted by humans (like persons replying - heh.) Why not the tests - there are some rules and regulations about unfair competition and the lawyers are watching. Also, all inclusive tests are not feasible, you can't do that even in a small, standalone PC.
Anyway - I have been in performance / capacity business recommending hardware and software over 30 years and find any and all hard numbers useful. You just learn to read between lines, match the numbers to the needs, do your own homework, look many other aspects than the performance numbers (usability, need of other resources, service, assumed lifetime, current environment, operation and other costs, risks, etc), put them in order of importance, grade them and then may add a little emotion - the color matches your other equipment or so.
Now - about Cisco, Nortel and other vendors. Yes, they have good and not so good products (what is good and on what way?) but all of them are suffering time to time about the "we are already the best" syndrome and sometimes lack in new development and enhancements. That's why we need these "benchmarks", to keep them awake.
Can Cisco handle guerilla tactics from Nortel?
It seems we saw this happen before. Back in the 80's we watched mainframes get removed and replaced by more reasonably consuming products. Then it engineers with pocket protectors and TIcalculators and clipboards adding watts and doing the cost rollup- today it looks to be, for one, Nortel, with their Energy Calculator.
Whenever energy becomes a concern of high importance-throughout history, the incumbent vendor loses tremendous credibility, because they typically win in a brute force way, and it seems today as in the past, they are not smart enough to admin their crystal ball was clouded by the residue of drinking their own koolaid.
Students of history should consider that a free for all has begun-just as it did 20 years ago, and it seems Nortel may have done their homework and started the conversation...in bold print.
Cisco may talk about yeild, but the only thing this opening battle of the next great data networking challenge is reduction of consumption in the network.... I guess if you conisider 'yield' to be gigabits per watt- but then Cisco would get smoked flat out by damn near every vendor in the industry.
It would appear the choice of pitching SONA ("the network is the comsumer, 'er the computer thing"), rather than the SOA (the rest of humankind) direction we have been hearing about was a foolish choice by another arrogant company, in this case...Cisco.
I seemed to remember that 20 years ago, three of the same letters held a very sobering fate for another company... remember SNA?
To boil it all down I guess you could just say....
"It's the electric bill, (Stupid!)".