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I spent a day last week at a Nortel’s analyst/media day, and here’s a couple of things I learned:

• Nortel’s partnership with Microsoft is critical to its UC strategy going forward, but Nortel also is cozying up to IBM pretty close. In the process, Nortel’s casting a shadow over 3Com’s partnership with IBM to embed IP-telephony in IBM System i midrange servers.

My friends Blair Pleasant and Sheila McGee-Smith have their take on this latest Nortel-IBM partnership at VoIP Loop. What I found interesting was that, whereas 3Com basically took its existing VCX IP-telephony platform and put it onto a blade for System i, Nortel actually had to go out and build a whole new module, one that’s neither BCS nor CS1000. The new module was built using open source elements from SIPFoundry, and part of the issue seems to revolve around the various products’ SIP implementations. VCX came out of 3Com’s carrier softswitch business and was SIP from the get-go; BCS and CS, clearly, were not. IBM made a big deal about 3Com’s world-class SIP implementation when that partnership was announced late last year (see Business Communications Review magazine, December 2006, p. 62).

System i was a good play for 3Com, and may turn out to be an even better play for Nortel-even if 3Com hangs in there and keeps a strong share of telephony-enabled System i shipments. IBM told me last year that its System i installed base is 130,000 customers worldwide, though Lori McLean, Nortel’s GM for the IBM alliance, claimed last week that there are 400,000 System i’s in the market right now, serving 240,000 businesses, with particular strength in the medical, retail, banking and insurance verticals.

Whatever the number, it’s clearly a ripe target for a telephony vendor that wants to leverage both the virtualization and the unified communications integration trends, and it’s another way for IBM to leverage System i’s reliability, among other features, to keep users on the platform.

Nortel says its System i integration aims at the smaller end of the SMB market, whereas the VCX play went much higher into the mid-market range, which makes sense given VCX’s larger scale. Yet Nortel also says it will sell into the higher end of the SMB space, which is an ominous portent for 3Com.

Nortel is starting to look like they want to be the smooth operator, so to speak, of the industry-cutting in first on Siemens’s dance with Microsoft, and now 3Com’s dance with IBM System i.

• Everyone wants to be UC, whatever the underlying reality of the market or the vendor’s offerings. Case in point is Nortel’s renaming of its IPT 1-2-3 migration program, which packages some pre-engineered, pre-configured solutions for easier migration. The new name is UC 1-2-3.

The Nortel folks got pretty well beaten up by the analysts on hand for last week’s meeting, who discerned little that was “UC” about the new program other than its name. The elements that tend to be most associated with UC-say, presence, Web collaboration and the like-weren’t included in the new program. In response, Net Payne, Nortel’s VP of North America enterprise marketing, contended: “I would argue that there is no market definition [for UC], because if I asked each of you, you’d each give a different answer.” Payne is right that there’s no single definition, but it’s pretty hard to call something that leaves out presence and IM features a UC anything.

Let’s face it, what we’re witnessing is a marketing terminology race. Nortel was boasting/complaining about how its “1-2-3″ naming convention was being borrowed by “others” in the market, a reference to the fact that Cisco has a channel partner program called “3-2-1 Blast-Off.” Especially given Cisco’s recent re-naming of CallManager to Unified Communications Manager, Nortel obviously felt the need to grab a chunk of the “UC” name for this particular marketing effort.

I sympathize. We have a conference and trade show in this market, and we know the importance of naming stuff-getting a name that captures a hot trend and is descriptive, yet is also generic enough to change shape with the market, so that you’re not renaming the thing every year or two. This whole megillah seems to underscore the fact that facts on the ground haven’t really caught up to the words we’re using.

What do you think? Drop me a note here in the VoiceCon Enews Forum or directly at ekrapf@cmp.com

Eric H. Krapf
Editor, Business Communications Review
VoiceCon Program Chair

Posted in Equipment, Market Trends, Unified Communications, VOIP |

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