Q&A: Nortel chief strategy officer discusses company's ambitions

Three months ago, Nortel tapped George Riedel, Juniper's strategy and business development chief, as its own chief strategy officer. It's Riedel's responsibility to establish the partnerships and investments that will deliver on CEO Mike Zafirovski's stated goals for Nortel to have a 20% share or better in key markets, such as IPTV, IMS, WiMAX and Metro Ethernet. Riedel took some time at Globalcomm 2006 to discuss Nortel's ambitions with Network World Managing Editor Jim Duffy.

How far into the home do you plan to go with IPTV?

I think the question might be, where can we be distinctive and add value… us being the 14th set top box player is probably not the answer. So (we're) looking to others in the ecosystem to provide that but not us. It could be a range of partnerships - we've got the LG joint venture, that would be the first place to look. Are there other places sure, but in the scheme of priorities, is finding a box …

There's a broad collection of players (for home digital entertainment). Can we work with those guys to invent technologies or to develop ways for end-to-end services to run better? Yes. Do I think we should be in those CPE businesses? No.

How do you plan to counter Lucent's recent momentum in IMS?

We have a large carrier VoIP business to build off of. We have 500 carrier VoIP installations around the world and a whole range of SIP businesses with it. That's a huge asset for us, to be able to go back in and say, can we migrate you from TDM to VoIP to IMS? So the principal focus is on getting that installed base to embrace an IMS vision that we're rolling out. Secondly, we have a set of partners that we're working with to enhance that. Not just in the transport and control plane layer; but actually in the application side. IBM is a partner of ours, we have a lab in Montpelier, Vt. And if you ask the question, what is IMS about at the end of the day? My belief is it's much more about enabling new applications and services, yet you have to have the scalable transport and control plane to go do that. But the magic is in the applications and services in terms of net new growth. So I think what you'll see is us focus more on the applications and services going forward while we migrate our existing base to an IMS architecture.

We're also trying to get to a standard platform. Getting to common components, getting to open systems so you can add value on applications would be a theme for us.

We are behind - I'm not so sure how much of that is product portfolio vs. perception. It's a question that we wrestle with. I think the answer's probably both. We need to invest to close gaps on both the marketing and the perception angle, as well as on the product angle.

In addition to your edge router and the blade server business, which product areas did you cancel or sell?

I'm a 90 day expert on all things at Nortel. Most of this happened last year or before my time so I just don't know all of the details.

It creates a fair amount of uncertainty so having a one on one relationship with the customer about the transition plan is important. Having a broadcast is interesting but having a 'Let me walk you through the migration and transition path' is probably more important from a customer standpoint. Customers come first so that's our focus there.