I just sat down with Larry Levenberg, who's VP/GM for national channels at NEC Corporation of America (more about that name in a bit). He told me NEC decided, from the start of the Nortel bankruptcy saga, not to follow along with most of its peers in the industry, who instituted aggressive programs to try and take advantage of the uncertainty of Nortel's situation to grab its customers."We chose to wait," Larry told me. "Customers, I thought, were frozen. We knew they're not going to make any decision.... Nobody's going to make a decision. How could they make a decision?"
Now that the situation has shaken out, NEC will be rolling out a program for Nortel customers, promoting both the 8500 and SV lines, as well as the more next-gen Sphericall. NEC has also added a couple of former Nortel dealers to its channel programs and is looking to strengthen its position with channel partners that offer both Nortel and NEC--the likes of BlackBox, Verizon and Shared Technologies.
It's an interesting approach, and not inconsistent with the tone of the conversation we had in yesterday's session here, "I'm a Nortel User, What Do I Do Now?" The message from the analysts and consultants there was that Nortel users shouldn't panic and shouldn't feel the need to make hasty moves; indeed, as Zeus writes, it's actually a good opportunity to play vendors off against each other to get a better deal.
I think Larry's probably right--and been proven right--that Nortel customers didn't make a lot of moves during the period of uncertainty of this past year. What we'll have to wait and see is whether those aggressive programs that competitors ran this year gave those competitors a head start for when the decision making happens; or whether NEC's right that Nortel customers aren't even thinking about a migration.
A quick word about NEC's recent restructuring, which Allan Sulkin blogged about shortly after it was announced in October. Larry Levenberg said, "The idea is we want 1 NEC face in North America."
