Just before the sudden resignations of President and COO Gary Daichendt and CTO Gary Kunis, Nortel CEO Bill Owens sat down with Network World’s Jim Duffy at Supercomm 2005 to discuss the state of Nortel after completing years of financial restatements. The following is an edited version of the interview.

Congratulations on completing Nortel's financial restatements. Was it a distraction?

There's been a lot of time, effort, money and management attention to get to this stage. We spent about $200 million in the last 12 months (on it). It has been a distraction. We've had a lot of management attention to this and a lot of sessions among ourselves to make certain that we understood all of the requirements. This has been a year in which we've had a lot of moving parts. It's been a transition year as we've gone through a number of management changes, a number of organizational changes, a restructuring -- 3,250 people we announced we were going to take out of Nortel. While being distracted, we've maintained the business pretty well around the world. We're now in a year where we think 2005 should be a good year.

What are your priorities now?

The priorities are really cash, cost and revenue. Each one is enormously important. We must be focused on growing revenue and growing market share. This company is very much different from a Lucent or Cisco or an Avaya or an Alcatel or Siemens. We have a large enterprise business and we have a large telecom equipment business. There are only a couple of companies who are similar. So this is a great opportunity as telecom networks become more and more IP, more and more packetized, and the enterprise business is itself, by it's nature, a packetized IT set of solutions. We believe that the synergy of the telecom networks and the enterprise business is very good, an important element of growing revenue.

What are your plans now after completing the restatements? There's been some speculation that you might step down or step aside.

No, I don't have any plans (to do that). You're not implying I'm old now, are you? But I'm in good health and I'll do what's best for Nortel. Hopefully, we'll get this company stable and growing, and that's what I'd like to see. I'll do the best thing for Nortel shareholders.