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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)."
so now instead of a few people reading about a company switching to asterisk, all of slashdot reads about how Nortel are a bunch of dicks.
nothing could possibly go wrong with this plan.
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Eat your own dogfood.
What happens when an article is posted in the form of an overly long rhetorical question with confusing formatting and mutiple choice answers where the third option is presumed to be the correct answer? A) Slashdot readers, being generally fairly intelligent and thorough readers, react with good humor and are amused by the clever presentation. B) People reading the summary are somewhat confused and are forced to read it again to understand what is being said. C) A snarky post is made that light-heartedly mocks the original poster.
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Every company I have worked at has a formal PR policy that says you cannot go on the record with the press (which is any time you are talking to them, if you are smart about it), you must clear it through PR. In some cases, once PR realizes that you're savvy enough to not say stupid things, they will put you on the "OK to contact directly" list.
Violating the company's PR policy is a big deal, for the obvious reasons. I'm surprised that the IT Director is still employed there.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
You might note that tens of thousands of nerds reading slashdot are going to find out about this today, and that the story will likely be picked up by an actual news outlet (as opposed to aggregator and discussion board, as is slashdot) soon enough, making Nortel look like precisely the big dipshits they are.
I don't actually know anyone who takes Nortel seriously any more anyway, though. I think the invisible hand of the free market is already giving Nortel what they so richly deserved, if their market share is continuing to drop at a rate similar to that of the three quarters beginning in '04 that cost them 8% not of their share, but of the market.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
D: Nortel takes the loss and redoubles its efforts to produce a VOIP system that is BETTER THAN THE OTHER OPTIONS! If companies would just shut up and stop trying to use lawyers and politics to keep customers and silence competitors maybe they could consentrate on making a product that is worthy of being used.
Ehm... How about... Not everyone is owned by Nortel?
Tada! Do I get a prize?
Deleted
Almost certainly Blade had a demo unit before they bought it. That's common practice.
Just because the one they purchased hasn't been installed yet, doesn't mean they never tested out a demo unit. Its pretty common to try before you buy.
"Competitor" shows the relationship of Fonality to Nortel, while "open source" is just a blatant use of a popular term that does nothing for the article other than to misleadingly cry "look at me!!"
What's Open Source got to do with the story? The phrase appears twice to describe what kind of product Fonality sells, and then not again for the rest of the entire story. If it was a closed system, would it make any difference to the story? Or a bigger question, would the story have made
As if we needed any more proof of the power that the blogosphere holds... The only thing Tom Keating has shown about the blogosphere is that it has the power to distort.
There are two winners here:
(a) Fonality. That a big ape like Nortel sits up and notices what they did, is testament to how well they handled the job of installing a viable alternative to Nortel's own equipment. This simply proves that Fonality and its products are justfiable expenditure.
(b) Asterisk. That a big ape like Nortel is frightened enough of it brings another feather in Asterisk and Digium's hat.
Nortel has embarassed itself on two accounts:
(a) Its own subsidiary refuses to use its products
(b) It's trying to force-feed its product on others -- how bad does that make it look?
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What's interesting about this is how Nortel's approach to Open Source competition is similar in ways to Microsoft's: Rather than compete based on true values of real innovation and service, they will put "strong-arm" pressure on customers and associates to get their way. Clearly such dinosaurs are unwilling to make the paradigm shift and running scared. I expect this sort of thing to go one with a number of Old-School industry giants, before they either buy into the OSS concept, or wither up and die.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
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.
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Well, as the unfortunate user of a new Nortel telephone system (a choice in which I had no say whatsoever) I can only say that 'customer oriented' is not a term I would associate with Nortel. Not remotely so.
I found both the telephone hardware and the PBX voice interface quite poorly designed. Perhaps it is pretty on the IT integration end, I can't judge that; and the sound quality is good. But whoever designed it forgot to consider human factor. Too many superfluous (and blinking) messages on the display, too long button sequences, an unfriendly and laborious voice mail system, and generally an too complicated interface. Lots of features, but poorly tuned to actual user needs. I think that I am quite good at figuring out how things work, but this telephone system had me seriously puzzled, and the 90-odd page manual wasn't even up to date. I have known lock-in amplifiers that were far more intuitive and easier to use...
If Nortel gets in a panic about the competition getting some publicity, the most logical explanation is that they are all too aware of the weaknesses of their own systems. It shouldn't be too hard for a good competitor to take a substantial market share.
Well, from TFA, Nortel is still holdes a minority interest in Blade (the "forced" company). Also, one of Nortel's VP's sits on Blade's board of directors.
Ownership and having control of a board memeber is an amazingly effective way to apply pressure to a company.
So while the slashdot article summary refers to Blade as a "former subsidiary", it fails to outline that Nortel does still has significant direct control over Blade.
-Matt
Nortel may or may not have strong-armed Fonality. The Fonality guy, Chris, said that Blade's Vikram Mehta (sounds Indian, is he?) tried to strong-arm Fonality and Fonality reminded Blade about the contract that was signed about using their system.
/. story yells out: "Nortel Strong-Arms Open Source Vendor".
When the author of the blog called Vikram, this guy basically admitted to nothing:
We spoke a little more, but as you can tell, I was getting nowhere with Vikram. However what "wasn't said" spoke volumes -- both from his demeanor and his avoiding answering my questions, in my mind confirmed what Chris said was accurate. I then contacted Nortel to get their perspective. I spoke with a Nortel employee who wishes to remain anonymous. He stated that Eric Schoch, the Nortel board member was travelling and therefore wasn't able to get him to respond. - so the author has believed what Fonality was saying but couldn't really get Blade to confirm this. The author has got a 'gut feeling' that Chris from Fonality was telling the truth and that Vikram from Blade didn't.
Then the author called Nortel:
The employee did however admit that he was aware that Eric sent Vikram (CEO of Blade) a note about the Fonality press release where it simply stated "I would appreciate seeing copies of any news releases that have our name 'Nortel' in it before they go out." The Nortel official explained, "Anything that uses our trademark name we like to take a look at it." The employee added that he was not aware of any pressure applied by Nortel to have Blade reverse their decision on selecting Fonality or forcing a retraction. - so this is the best that we have here and yet the
Oh, don't forget that the author then brings up the fact that Nortel is loosing market share. Well, duh.
This whole thing may or may not be true actually.
You can't handle the truth.
It's the product of someone who used to own them. And apparently still has some influnce.
The summary and article are both incorrect.
The person in question is NOT a "Nortel board member." He is on the Board of Directors of Blade Network Technologies, the company which issued the press release. It's perfectly reasonable for a member of a company's Board of Directors to call the CEO and tell them they disagree with a decision, it no doubt happens quite frequently, since that's part of what the BoD does.
Now, that particular board member is also an employee of Nortel (Vice President of Business Development, according the BoD bio), but that does not mean that he was speaking from that capacity.
It's really pretty stupid to issue a press release which disses a company with which one of your board members has an outside relationship. Whoever approved that press release (Director of IT?) should have known that 2 of 4 members of his own company's board, including the CEO, had strong ties to the company he was dissing. The reaction shouldn't be unexpected.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Yes, PBXtra is based on Asterisk, but it is a licensed closed-source derivative of the Asterisk code.
You can not have the source for PBXtra. They'll give you the Asterisk code before they apply their patches, but they won't give you the source for their interface or their changes.
They might if you buy their product --I don't know, I've never bought it, but you are certainly not allowed to distribute the product to someone else after you buy it.
Just sayin'.
Anyway, Trixbox is FOSS. But PBXtra -- no.
--J(K) DOS is like Unix in exactly the same way that a pinto is like an aircraft carrier.
"have Fonality print a retraction to the blog article (and the subsequent press release)."
:)
Nortel wants some other company to do a restatement?
That's rich.
Never play chicken with a passive aggressive.
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.
Its not what it is, its something else.
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!
-Billco, Fnarg.com
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.
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.
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The Nortel BCM50 PBX is also based on Linux .... except they don't supply the source with the system.
Asterisk is quirky, has a crappy configuration language and seven bazillion configuration files.
And it's still better than all of your proprietary products.
Exactly. Asterisk is the new sendmail. Crap, but mostly reliable, and everything else is far worse. And just like sendmail what Asterisk proves is that there's a huge opportunity for someone to make one that works - OSS or no.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
More to the point, CEOs tend to listed to VoIP geeks when we tell them we can build them a vastly more flexible phone system for 1/4 of what they'd spend on a big-budget vendor -- mine did.
You might be right, but I really doubt it. I just entertained 5 offers from 5 vendors for VoIP systems. No OSS, yet every one was 80% cheaper than what was offered just 4 years ago. Am I missing something? If commercial solutions are 80% cheaper since 5 years ago shouldn't OSS solutions be, what, 95% cheaper? I'm sure you might be able to offer me a system that is 1/20 the price of what I could buy 4 years ago. The problem is, that it doesn't matter. For a few dollars more, I'm happy to pay for corporate support.
PS I have made my living for the last 8 years using OSS, hell, I'm even posting via Gnome and my last windows box is running '98. I run a small shop and support in the low hundreds of customers and I am very happy doing it. But when I buy a phone system, a cell phone, a router, whatever, I can give two shits about philosophy. I just want it to work and when it breaks, I want to make a phone call and have it fixed.
It just looks one sided. He certainly gave Nortel and Blade a chance to air their side of the story, and they declined. Their silence makes it one sided.
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You wouldn't rather just fix it yourself?
You seem to be equating free software with free employees. I'm not sure what business you are in, but I need to pay for my help.
What happens when AP forgets to pay the support contract bill?
They get fired, that's what.
Also, free software is about more than "philosophy" it's really about the license. Good luck with all your commercial solutions when your company hits a cash flow problem, or forgets to pay the support bill, or uses an unsupported configuration, or allows support to lapse and they want to recertify.
Again, I laugh at your confidence with OSS solutions over commercial solutions. 95% of OSS doesn' even offer what you are suggesting.