Nortel expects to emerge frombankruptcy protectionwithin 12 to 24
months, says one of its European executives.
François Lançon, Nortel's new president of enterprise sales for
EMEA, said the company had filed for protection against its
creditors while having $2.4bn in cash and a "reasonable" order book
for the next 12 months.
Lançon said a customer survey just completed showed that half
were not going to change their plans because of the Chapter 11
filing, and only 3% to 4% were "deeply worried" by it.
He added that his immediate aim was to change his division,
which contributes one-third of Nortel's revenues, into selling
solutions rather than boxes.
"Rather than talk to the network manager, as we have done in the
past, we would like to talk to the CIO," he said.
Lançon's strategy appears similar to that followed by
BT's Global Services division, which last quarter was blamed for a
£336m write-off.
Industry speculators say much of this was due to problems with
BT's contract with the
NHS's National Programme for IT where it has two multi-billion
pound contracts - one for the NHS's national private network known
as the Spine, and one to deliver an electronic patient record
system.
Lançon said Nortel is a partner with BT in the NHS projects, but
was unable to comment further ahead of Nortel's latest financial
results, due next week. But he indicated that he would welcome
business such as the Spine contract, especially in the healthcare,
government, financial services and hospitality sectors.
"Unified communications to improve business processes" would
become the company mantra, he suggested.
He said the maturity of customers prepared to hear Nortel's
pitch came mainly from the UK, Germany, the Middle East, Australia
and India, the last because of its highly developed software and
outsource sectors.
Lançon said 70% of Nortel's products were software. "We have a
very good application development platform and systems development
toolkit that we can use with partners to deliver solutions," he
said.
He added that he had moved quickly to ensure that Nortel's
channel partners were looked after despite the Chapter 11
filing.
"We had to protect them, and I've launched a number of
incentives to ensure that they can do profitable business," he
said.
And the
London Olympics in 2012, where Nortel holds the
communications contract?
"Absolutely no question about that we are going to retain it and
deliver. We are building it even now," he said. "After all, it's
the only way I might get a seat."
News broke this morning that Radware had bought the application
development division that Nortel aquired in 2000 from Alteon.
The division specialised in systems for the higher layers of the
seven-layer Open Systems Interconnect model.
Computer Weekly asked Lançonif this affected his plans to sell
business process optimisation solutions to enterprise
customers.
"It doesn't," he said, "at least not in any negative way. The
L4-7 portfolio was always a specialist technology area with
dedicated R&D resources, separate to our applications
development teams.
"The divestiture of these assets has no direct impact on other
areas of the business.
"Moreover, it allows us to focus resources on our core
competencies and drive industry leading differentiation for
enterprise networking solutions (including L2-3 for access &
core, WLan, management and security). This lays the foundation for
higher-end integrated applications and a superior end-to-end
unified communications solution."
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