Peter Kelly who led Nortel’s enterprise division for EMEA, before he and Nortel parted ways last month has been hired by Vodafone UK as its new enterprise director.
“I”m delighted to be joining the organization at such a dynamic time. It’s an exciting place to be and I relish the challenges ahead of me,” Kelly said.
It looks like a sweet gig as it’s the most senior position in Vodafone’s highly lucrative and market leading corporate and SME division. According to Mobile Today, the leading contender for the job was Mark Bond, who had been acting enterprise director for six months.
Kelly will report to UK Chief Executive Nick Read and will lead the expansion of Vodafone’s enterprise business into unified communications
There are rumors - and I stress rumors - that IBM is going to acquire Nortel.
Yup, that’s the speculation that has reportedly been gaining a lot of traction. Don’t ask me where I heard this rumor but I’ll try to provide more details as they emerge.
With Nortel trading at $5.90, IBM is looking at a $2.93-billion acquisition, not including a takeover premium. So perhaps we’re looking at a $3.5-billion to $4-billion deal.
Nortel and IBM are no strangers. In 2005, they signed an agreement to collaborate on the design and development of new products, while creating a Nortel-IBM Joint Development Center in North Carolina.
As well, Nortel’s chief marketing officer, Lauren Flaherty, spent 26 years with IBM before joining Nortel in 2006.
Nortel and IBM have signed an agreement to collaborate on the design and development of new products and services, the companies announced Friday.
As part of that agreement, the two companies will establish a Nortel-IBM Joint Development Center in North Carolina.
Filed Under (Industry Sales) by Mark Evans on 04-09-2008
On the surface, Nortel selling 40G optical technology to Bell Canada isn’t terribly newsworthy. If you look a little deeper, however, it’s pretty interesting.
First, the optical market has been showing signs of life after the bandwidth glut caused during the telecom boom saw a tremendous amount of dark fiber created. As online video, particularly high-definition, becomes more popular, the need for more bandwidth is growing. Many carriers and cablecos realize they need to invest in their optical infrastructure to meet consumer demand. Nortel has enthusiastically been talking about a bandwidth boom so perhaps this is a positive sign.
The fact Bell is investing in 40G optical should not be a surprise given it needs to upgrade its infrastructure to compete against Rogers and Videotron (two large cablecos in Ontario and Quebec). But Bell has more than $30-billion of debt after a leveraged buyout, and it recently conceded it isn’t going to be as aggressive as many people expected about upgrading its infrastructure.
Nortel’s solution will enable 40G transmission to co-exist within Bell’s current 10G network. Bell expects to have significant cost savings by using the existing infrastructure rather than deploying new fibre or alternate solutions for the metro and long haul parts of its network.
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As Nortel looks for markets where it can drive growth, it’s been paying more attention to the enterprise. This has been highlighted by its aggressive energy efficiency campaign that has seen Nortel take direct aim at Cisco.
While it’s left to be seen whether Nortel’s strategic embrace of green will produce dividends, there is little doubt it has attracted some attention, including a lot of blog coverage and a story in the Wall St. Journal.
“We found ourselves with a home run in terms of results,” said Lauren Flaherty, Nortel’s CMO told BtoB.com, pointing to the success of its earlier campaign in May.
Buoyed by its success, Nortel is poised to get even more aggressive with a “louder and broader” campaign. This will see banner ads placed on several high-traffic sites such as CIO.com, Information Week, ComputerWorld and InfoWorld.
Nortel will also run television ads with the first spots appearing today in North America on CNN before appearing in Europe later this week and globally on Sept. 15. The campaign’s tag line will be “Nortel data networks run with up to 40% less energy.”
Here’s the two TV ads that Nortel will be running:
While Nortel is not expected to have a stellar year from a revenue perspective, there may be some positive signs that better times lie ahead.
In a research report, Independent Investment Research analyst Jatin Pradeep suggests Nortel could see “significant y-o-y margin improvement to drive growth. Subsequently, our revenue and adjusted operating margin estimates for FY 2008 and FY 2009 remain broadly unchanged.”
That said, Pradeep has lowered his six to 24-month target price to US$9.91 from US$11.42 based on the anticipation of lower free cash flow and worsened market sentiments.
Below, you’ll find a table looking at IIR’s revised revenue and earnings estimates:
Not sure what’s happening but the traffic on AAN has seen a significant increase recently. It may be that there never seems to be a dull moment in Nortel-Land.
In any event, thanks for visiting and commenting. Just so you know, Nortel keeps a pretty close eye on AAN. I guess it’s become the unofficial news outlet for some people.
One thing I wanted to ask is what, if anything, you’d like to see on AAN. Do you want more investment news, stock updates, reviews on technology, news about other telecom suppliers, etc.?
Filed Under (Technology) by Mark Evans on 28-08-2008
The discussion about why Nortel is encouraging its employees to make videos about the company’s “green” strategy has been live, interesting and a study in contrasts.
In the interest of fairness, you should check out Nortel Buzzboard today where Bo Gowan explains why Nortel has embraced video.
Filed Under (Industry Sales) by Mark Evans on 28-08-2008
Barry Richards is, by far, the most bullish analyst on Nortel with a 12-month target price of $23.
Some of his enthusiasm for Nortel’s prospect lie in his belief that Nortel is well positioned to do well as China’s telecom market evolves, grows and consolidates. Among the activity is a merger between China Netcom Group and China Unicom, which combined have 279 million wireless and wireline subscribers.
Richards think Nortel could see huge dividends from the Unicom-Netcom merger as it supplies to both Unicom and Telecom. “This is a glorious opportunity for Nortel, already a supplier to both China Unicom and China Telecom,” he said in a research note. “Overall, China has the potential to pull Nortel’s business and its stock out of its long-term funk and we believe they are well positioned to exploit that market.”
The Chinese telecom market is fertile ground for telecom suppliers given carriers are spending billions of dollars to build new networks and upgrade exisitng ones. China Unicom, for example, said earlier this month it could invest as much as $14.6 billion (100 billion yuan) over the next two years to build a 3G wireless, while China Telecom plans to spend $11.7 billion.
Nortel has been among the corporate leaders in embracing social media, showing a willingness to experiment with blogging, podcasting and videos that many other companies are reluctant or unwilling to do.
But you have to wonder about the latest social media initiative in which Nortel has asked employees to create “homemade” videos to put the spotlight on the company’s green and energy efficiency strategy. Three of these in-house videos will be posted on Nortel’s Buzzboard blog this week, while two professionally-made videos (I suspect made by non-Nortel employees!) will be posted next Tuesday.
Then, Nortel employees will get to vote for their favorites, and whichever video wins will become part of an online advertising campaign. It sure seems like a long way from when Nortel blew its brains out during the telecom boom with television commercials that used the Beatles’ “Come Together”.
I’ll give Nortel marks for creativity and social media enthusiasm but I’m not sure that making in-house videos part of an online ad campaign is a smart move. That’s not to say there aren’t really creative people working for Nortel but it’s not I’m not sure their efforts should be going into making corporate videos.
Canadian Business writer Andrew Wahl also has his reservations:
A couple of things spring to mind. First off: Way to go Nortel for not exactly blowing the advertising budget! Considering the financial pressures they have (this morning, Lehman Brothers joined a conga-line of other analyst downgrades and slashed its price target to US$6 from US$15.50, citing “several possible headwinds,” and in particular, the carrier networks division’s grim outlook for revenue growth), the idea of a crudely drawn cartoon with eerie background music posted to YouTube does seem more prudent than, say, a lavish network television ad blitz.
Three years after buying a stake in India’s Sasken Technologies, Nortel has reportedly exited by selling the 9.3% it had left in the company, which develops software for 3G wireless and broadband DSL technologies.
The stake in Sasken was the brain-child of ex-Nortel CEO Bill Owens, who also committed Nortel to a money-losing contact BSNL.
