Nortel is looking to re-enter the enterprise router market through a partnership to better compete against Cisco, according to Vice Chairman and CEO Bill Owens.

Owens would not say who Nortel is looking to partner with but did acknowledge that enterprise routing is currently a gap in the company's product portfolio. Curiously, his statements come as Nortel prepares to enter beta trials with two internally developed routers, the Secure Router 6230 and 6280, believed to be those codenamed "Dolphin".

"We don't have a profoundly important router product," Owens said during an interview at Supercomm 2005. "We're aware of that. So you wouldn't expect us to not be doing anything about that."

Asked if Nortel would develop a router internally or partner, Owens said: "We are much more of a mind nowadays to partner than we have been at Nortel in the past. If we just had a year to put some time and money and effort, we'd build a better one. But I don't think that's where we're at now. We're very much in the mode of saying, 'the future is built on solution sets, applications, complete turnkey operations, and it's unlikely that anyone by themselves is going to be the answer to that.' So there are a lot of opportunities to partner."

A Nortel spokesman would not confirm the brand names for Dolphin but he says it and another router codenamed "Triton" are still under development, and that Nortel plans to ship Dolphin by the end of this year. Nortel users say they will beta test Dolphin in July and that Nortel plans to make it generally available in September.

Nortel officials also say the company's delayed MPE 9000 multiservice edge router for carriers can also be deployed as a core router in large enterprises. And the company continues to offer its VPN Router line, formerly known as Contivity, which Nortel says provides IPsec and SSL VPN, firewall, bandwidth management, encryption, authentication, and data integrity.

"I have not heard about the new router line from my Nortel account team," says Sheng Guo, CTO for the New York State Unified Court System. "We use their Contivity security switch as routers in many locations.  Maybe I should check the new stuff out."

With Dolphin and Triton in the pipeline, it is unclear why Nortel would need to partner for an enterprise router. It is also unclear which vendor they plan to partner with, but observers have mentioned the following candidates: