Over at ZDNet, Dave Greenfield has an interesting take on how Nortel's Enterprise business could remain strong in spite of the overall company's troubles. Dave takes the optimistic tack, which you pretty much have to do if you want to talk about Nortel's future at all, these days.
The idea of getting enterprise away from the ill-starred service provider business sounds appealing; it was one of the things I was getting at in this post from last week. The parallels to Avaya pre-Lucent spinoff are strong, at least at a high level.
The difference is that the industry, as a whole, seems even weaker today, and the competition to the traditional players for enterprise voice is indisputably stronger--i.e., Cisco and Microsoft.
Dave rightly points out that Nortel's Enterprise losses were smaller this quarter than its Carrier division's. And in some ways, if enterprises slow down their capital spending, that could theoretically stave off a mass movement away from Nortel on the part of customers worried about the vendor's future. If they're not buying, at least they're not replacing Nortel as their primary vendor.
But it's still an uphill struggle. Brent Kelly offered a solid rebuttal to my musing about Avaya's ability to thrive in private ownership, and the same would clearly apply to Nortel's enterprise division if Nortel wound up getting sold off in parts.
As Dave Greenfield notes, Nortel still has a lot of forward-thinking R&D going on, but the focus now has to be on keeping the existing customer base, or there won't be anyplace for that R&D to go.
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