Nortel Strong-Arms Open Source Vendor Fonality

leecidivo alerts us to Tom Keating's blog, where he writes about how Nortel forced a former subsidiary to return its open source-based phone system (Fonality) after the subsidiary went public with how happy they are with the Fonality phone system compared to Nortel. Quoting: "What happens when a VoIP blog (yours truly) writes about the fact that a former Nortel subsidiary (Blade Network Technologies) went looking for a new phone system, chose an open-source Asterisk-based solution from Fonality instead of using Nortel's own PBX and then agreed to go on record on the VoIP & Gadgets blog about why they made such a shocking decision? A) Nothing — it's a VoIP blog — who cares? Nortel is an $11 billion dollar company that certainly doesn't read blogs for their news. B) Nortel reads the blog post, is a little peeved, but other than some emails sent internally, no one outside Nortel would ever know they were annoyed. C) A Nortel Board Member flips out over the article, contacts Blade and then pressures Blade to return the Fonality system and have Fonality print a retraction to the blog article (and the subsequent press release)."

First rule of good development:

[KillerCow]

Eat your own dogfood.

Beautiful

[obtuse]

This is the best Asterisk sales pitch I've ever seen. Nortel is afraid. The big equipment vendors can barely sell to their captive customers, and they know it.

We had millions in Avaya equipment. My migration plan was to introduce Asterisk servers to perform a few specialized functions, interfacing with our existing dozen Definity switches and use that to leverage our way towards Asterisk. We'd keep the Definity PBXs for running large offices, but use the Asterisk systems for VoIP integration and offload more & more functionality to Asterisk. The Lucent/Definity stuff is great but almost twice as much as Nortel.

I pissed off the new CIO though, so I was replaced by someone who wanted to buy a thousand VoIP adapters to use with consumer VoIP accounts. It all works out though. He's smart so he'll learn (at the company's expense) and I don't have to deal with that CIO anymore. Everybody gets what they deserve.

Need a telecom manager in the IE? Try me.

Nortel phones are not good

[Necroman]

My office (of 50 people) has been using Cisco phones for 4 years now, and they have been wonderful to us. Well, corporate (9000 people) decided that we are going to move to a full Nortel phone system. As the phones were being installed, we started complaining how much the new system sucks (our old phones were so much better). Well, the Nortel contractors that were installing our phones come over to us and proceeds to tell us how almost every single company they have helped move from Cisco to Nortel phones does nothing but complain how bad the Nortel system is.

Screw you Nortel, learn to make some phones that don't suck.

Is Nortel in end-game mode yet ?

[billcopc]

Having witnessed a huge chunk of my city's IT population get sloppily downsized by Nortel years ago, seeing them pull this sort of cry-baby move makes me wonder if the company is on the verge of extinction. So they lost one client to a competitor, who probably offered a better fit for price and features than Nortel's big archaic systems. The fact that this client was a former subsidiary of Nortel does not give the latter a license to publicly ream their former partners in a fit of jealousy. Sure, it's a big hit against the company's image, underlining the fact that Nortel hasn't been a leader in a very long time. Where I live, the word Nortel is a synonym for fraud, failure. They fucked over their staff, they fucked over their shareholders, and now they're trying to fuck over their own offspring. It's as though they want to make sure everyone knows they can't compete anymore.

Well, thanks for the warning. Oh, and SUE ME!

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

[dskoll]

All you proprietary PBX vendors out there: Be very afraid. Asterisk is quirky, has a crappy configuration language and seven bazillion configuration files.

And it's still better than all of your proprietary products.

We switched to Asterisk about a year ago and haven't looked back. It integrates seamlessly with our CRM system, our trouble-ticketing system, etc., etc. It's amazingly liberating to be in control of your own PBX.

Not Shocking At All

[baptiste]

I worked for NORTEL's R&D Labs (formerly Bell Northern Research) back in the mid/late 90s and they did this kind of stuff all the time. Our R&D Network was heavily overloaded at the time and we needed to get 100Mbps switched to the desktop badly. So the network guys speced out a kick butt system from Fore - ATM backbone with fiber to the edge switches and 100Mbps to the desktops. Spent a ton of money on it and it worked great. We also were in the initial middle of our first 802.11 deployment at the time. They installed a bunch of Aironet's access points which worked very well as wireless laptops became more prevalent.

NORTEL bought Bay Networks that year - most of the new network infrastructure was barely a year old. And all of it was ripped out and replaced with Bay Networks gear in short order. The worst part was the gear they replaced it with wasn't up to the Fore level for the backbone - that took another year or two as I recall for the Bay stuff to equal it.

I can see the PR argument for it I guess, but geez, what a colossal waste of money. I can see migrating to your own stuff as part of the refresh cycle, but why waste so much money just to avoid having to explain that 'yes, we have a competitors network installed prior to the buyout and it helps our engineers compare our products to the competition' or something.

Re:Beautiful

[Anonymous Coward]

Working at a wireless telco that used to use Nortel for its SGSN/GGSN (passports), they swapped them out when Nortel wouldn't give kick backs to the *IO's.. Ericcson, Lucent came in swapped all the hardware out. Cost the company millions. One director was given a VP job at Ericcson for the hardware swap out of the BSC's from Nokia. Amazing how much criminal stuff goes on in big companies to get people to switch vendors, even when it costs and worse quality....

Re:PBXtra is not Open Source

[Anonymous Coward]

Fonality has no commercial license from Digium. Fonality has claimed to make improvements to the Asterisk code, but they have not released any supposed changes back to the community. They are supposedly compliant with the letter of the GPL by placing source files on the physical machines they ship to customers. It may be the letter, but definitely not the spirit, of open source.