Nortel Reiterates Focus on 3 Key Areas: Mobility, Enterprise and Services

Nortel (News - Alert) President and CEO Mike Zafirovski on Wednesday reiterated the company’s three key areas of focus – sentiments that were echoed last Friday during a conference call outlining the sale of Nortel’s UMTS business to the ever-growing Alcatel.

At a press conference in London , Zafirovski repeated his goal of making Next-Generation Mobility, Enterprise Transformation and Services & Solutions the heart of the new Nortel. The announcement is a sharp contrast to the accounting-mired Nortel of a year ago when a newly installed Zafirovski was still dealing with a turnaround plan.

“The Nortel of tomorrow looks much different than the Nortel that most people think they know today. It is getting smaller and more focused on certain markets. In the 1990’s they were in many businesses and were much larger. Today they are much smaller, but still a strong company. They need to focus on more limited scope of services ,” noted telecom analyst Jeff Kagan said recently in a research note.

To reinforce that notion, Nortel officials leveraged the spotlight of today’s event to detail a wave of contract wins. In the Mobility arena, the company is working for Craig Wireless in as well as Golden Telecom (News - Alert) and COMCOR Group, both from . The Enterprise Transformation business won over the Telegraph Group and The Economist Group while the Services & Solutions practice is tending to business VoIP services for Swisscom.

“In the broadest sense of the term, mobility is about freedom and possibility. By leveraging our strength in Metro Ethernet, CDMA and our renewed investment in 4G wireless, we will drive simple and effective convergence,” Zafirovski said in a press release. “The bandwidth glut left by the Internet bubble bursting has disappeared and we clearly see the opportunity for next generation optical and backbone transport networks. We aim to capture the video explosion and, with IMS, ensure next-generation convergence services become a reality at an affordable price point.”

“Customers want to see their business applications integrated with their telephony systems and this lies at the heart of our Enterprise Transformation. We will create a powerful ecosystem of disruptive partnerships and -- coupled with strong go-to-market capabilities -- will re-invent voice and further blur the lines between IT and telephony.”

“Expanding Nortel's Services capability is an integral part of our future. We will also expand our ‘reusable’ solutions offerings to deliver powerful bundles and integration capabilities -- freeing customers to integrate and manage as much or as little of their network as they want,” said Zafirovski.

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Robert Liu is Executive Editor at TMCnet. Previously, he was Executive Editor at Jupitermedia and has also written for CNN, A&E, Dow Jones and Bloomberg. For more articles, please visit Robert Liu's columnist page.

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