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Can We Learn from the Nortel Fire Sale?

In his Communications and Technology Blog, Rich Tehrani writes:

Nortel, a once-great company with a market cap of $250 billion is effectively being sold off at bargain-basement prices. In fact Nokia Siemens Network (NSN) picked up the ailing Canadian company's CDMA and LTE business for about one times revenue or $650 million. For NSN the deal means a stronger North American presence and also they go from not having a CDMA business to becoming number two. They will have to work hard to maintain this business as Asian rivals are coming on strong. An additional benefit of the deal is a number of LTE patents, technology and expertise which will come in very handy as the world transitions to faster wireless broadband networks. I have seen some surmise Nortel went down because of open source and the Internet and to some degree this is part of the problem. But perhaps the biggest problem at Nortel was failure to adjust to a market that moves faster than ever coupled with the inability to effectively integrate acquired companies. Some Nortel employees told me the company was too flexible with the companies they acquired and should have set tougher rules regarding integration.

The major take away from this ordeal is how a company with superior technology got beaten by other companies with inferior technology but better M&A, management, and marketing skills. At the end of the day the products are important but as Nortel continues to show us, having great technology alone does not a long-term successful strategy make. Visit Rich´s blog at http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/rich-tehrani/ VoIP Is Taking Off

In his On Rad´s Radar, Peter Radizeski of RAD-INFO, Inc writes:

Although there have been analysts who think that IP Lines will slow down, I have to think that in the economic reality we are facing, the distributed workforce, the tele-worker, and the mobility of employees, more and more lines will move to VoIP. For cost savings as well as productivity reasons.

If lines do slow down it will be due to the following reasons:

• Layoffs - less employees = less lines needed
• Mobility means less landlines needed
• E-mail, social networks, IM/chat, texting is replacing phone calls
• Overall trend for less phone calls

There are so many reasons for small and medium businesses (and self-employed persons) to migrate to VoIP that I don't see it being stagnant for long.

Visit Peter´s blog at http://blog.tmcnet.com/on-rads-radar/
Salesforce.com

In his "First Coffee" blog, TMCnet´s David Sims writes:

alesforce.com has announced that Advent Software, which sells software and services for the global investment management industry, has deployed Salesforce CRM and the Force.com platform throughout the company for what Advent officials say are "hundreds of sales, marketing, professional services, customer support, IT, finance, and executive management employees."

Belinda Rodman, Chief Information Officer, Advent Software, says that "cloud computing has delivered rapid time to value and has been widely adopted by our employees."

Advent uses Salesforce CRM as a central data repository to "help sales and customer service better understand customers, " Advent officials say, adding that its high adoption rate among users "ensures that customer data is consistent and reliable, " and that the company "benefits from custom forecasts and dashboards that provide real time views of key opportunity and deal metrics, and make it easy to compare historical data."

In addition to Salesforce CRM, Advent is developing project management and other custom applications on the Force.com platform, using what Advent officials describe as ‘multiple Force.com sandbox environments" for developing and testing new customizations and applications before deploying them.

Visit David´s blog at http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm

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