Nortel Needs Some Friends

Nortel has had its fair share of problems in the last few years that have reduced staff by over half, decimated the balance sheet and rendered loses for the last several years. That being said, Nortel has survived largely on the fact that they make good products and their history has largely been based on engineering excellence. Couple that with a large customer base with a huge investment in Nortel products and you can remain in business a long time. However the problems of the past are slowly being removed and many of the efforts are now being turned to the future however there is one trend that remains from the past and that is Nortel’s small partner community. A large part of Cisco’s success is based on it’s skill at partnering large and small. In fact their most successful partnering efforts are with small companies, companies that have a vested interest in the Cisco ecosystem, not just technology innovation but channel partner innovation too. This is where I fault Nortel. Although they have partnerships with larger companies, such as Microsoft they have yet to understand the power of building communities of vested interest in a way that Cisco, IBM and others do. I use the term ‘vested interest’ as a group that have a vested interest in the community’s survive rather than a group of partners with (temporarily) aligned self interest. A large part to Cisco’s success in IP Telephony was not only that they had no baggage to bring forward (which does show in their products), from the very beginning showed how to foster innovation in their platform. This resulted in some very powerful new tools from companies like Cistera Networks, Pivot Technologies, Litescape and others. Nortel would do well to learn the lessons of the partner experts like IBM and Cisco and realign how they partner to realize a much greater partner eco system than they currently have. There are some encouraging signs coming out from the Nortel Developer Conference next month, but as they say the proof is in the execution.