From Nortel's View: SIP R&D

This morning, I discussed the acquisition of Pingtel, and the integration of it's technologies into the Nortel portfolio. In all fairness to the industry, it's important for me to analyze the other side of the deal from a "big telecom" perspective, thus, Nortel. Let's play "Devil's advocate", shall we?

To be completely honest, at each of my three desks at three different organizations, I have a Nortel phone. Whether it's connected to a BCM, a Meridian, or a CS1000, one thing is very important: every time I lift the handset, I know that I'll get a dialtone. Sitting at the central office in my hometown is a Nortel DMS-100 CO switch. My point? Before any feature sets can be compared, it's important to understand that rock-solid stability of any product is absolutely key. After reading my previous post about Nortel's Pingtel acqusition, I realized that it's quite easy to be critical of a large, or "big telecom" type of company.

In a technology such as SIP, or any developing protocol that is positioned to become a "standard", it's important to remember that large companies take longer to act on a developing technology. A company such as Nortel or Avaya simply can't "move on a dime" and adapt the newest protocol standards within a few months. For these companies that have hundreds-of-thousands, if not millions of customers, this becomes a reality. These things take time!

Through acquisitions and deals such as Pingtel, Nortel is aiming to increase it's R&D into technologies such as SIP, which is the building block that Pingtel products are built upon. So, in contrast, doesn't the Pingtel-Nortel deal illustrate that Nortel is committed to a technology such as SIP?

I'll make it clear: Nortel is progressing in their R&D processes of SIP and other standards-based protocols. However, it's the end-to-end communication that really matters. Nortel has been promoting corporate blogs to brief the end-user on recent business and technology developments. Does this help the end-user understand and appreciate the slower timing of software and feature developments?

Technologies such as SIP simply cannot be easy for big telecom. It requires re-tooling and adapting top-to-bottom product suites to accommodate the technological advances occurring in open source markets. This poses the question: As the consumer, should we simply be more patient? What do you think?