Posted by: Michael Disabato
With the strains of Queen echoing in my ears, I can hardly say I am surprised at Nortel's bankruptcy filing other than to say I expected it earlier. Nortel has taken a great company with really good products and mismanaged it.
When they bought Bay Networks, Nortel improved the product line and made an excellent series of enterprise-class network equipment. Too bad no one knew about it. A weak or non-existent marketing plan will kill any product.
Nortel's VoIP strategy was pretty good. They had a large installed base of Meridian systems but failed to capitalize on that base and convince them to upgrade. Or maybe they didn't have a compelling value proposition to beat Cisco.
Let's not even get to the IP address management product mess. Nortel had one of the best and botched that one. First they declared it at end of life. Then they recanted, but did nothing to improve the product while the IPAM appliance vendors and other software vendors continued to advance their offerings.
I often compare the sinking of the Titanic and the loss of the space shuttle Challenger to the same thing: bad management. I can now add the demise of Nortel.
Michael
