Nortel/BNT VoIP PR SNAFU (and RTFM on BCC)
Jingle-jangle, Thursday's IT Blogwatch: in which Nortel digs itself a classic PR disaster. Not to mention the neuroscience professor who liked his email app's BCC feature a little too much...
L'inq's Nick Farrell reports:
Nortel threw its toys out of the pram after a former subsidiary, Blade Network Technologies, bought an Open Source Voice-over-IP from Fonality instead of using the telco's own PBX. Nortel probably would not have noticed the change but Fonality had a word with a blogger about why it made the move.
Then, according to the VoIP & Gadgets blog, a Nortel [executive] saw the article and 'flipped out'. He rang Blade, told it to return the Fonality system and demand that Fonality print a retraction to the blog article.
...
Of course Blade is not talking, but Fonality's CEO, Chris Lyman said he had a call from Stefan Zuckut, Blade’s Vice President of Corporate Development. Stefan told him that a board member from Nortel read the blog and hit the roof. He got a call from the CEO of Blade, Vikram Mehta, who says that he is returning their brand-new, still-in-the-box phone system because Blade had changed its mind.
Last week, Tom Keating had this:
BLADE Network Technologies is a former subsidiary of Nortel and get this - they selected Fonality’s Asterisk-based PBXtra over a comparable system from Nortel. Even though Nortel offered their former subsidiary a discounted price, it was still much more than PBXtra. Chris and Amon explained to me that Fonality was able to offer PBXtra at less than 50 percent of the cost of a proposed Nortel system and that included junking the existing Nortel phonesets with all new VoIP phonesets.
...
One of the main reasons BLADE chose PBXtra was that it scaled better and was easier to manage than a Nortel system [and] that Nortel's digital and IP hybrid solution has hard system limitations, which require a significant system overhaul to increase capacity beyond 90 seats.
This week Tom Keating has this:
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 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).
...
Yes ... it would appear that we have Nortel peeved that one of their former subsidiaries chose an open-source IP-PBX (PBXtra from Fonality) and who had the audacity to speak to the press about why they made such a decision. Why, the nerve! ... the fact that a Nortel executive took exception to my blog post and contacted Blade to apply pressure is almost beyond belief.
... [long, gory details deleted] ...
Let's tally the score to try and figure out who is lying and who is telling the truth ... Fonality claim that [Blade] called them and stated unequivocally that a Nortel board member was very upset over the blog article and press release and as a result Blade demanded a retraction and a return. When I contacted [the CEO of] Blade, he was evasive, wouldn't set the record straight, and simply hid behind "customer-in-confidence" ... although the board member in question was not available for comment, the Nortel representative ... claims however they were simply upset that Nortel was not consulted for approval in the issuance of the press release.
...
C'mon!
Mike Masnick compares Nortel with Barbara Streisand:
Nortel handed a much smaller open source rival a huge marketing opportunity by freaking out ... [the] blog post ... and a press release ... was a decent enough marketing opportunity, but Nortel just made it much, much bigger for Fonality.
...
The end result, of course, is that Fonality's open-source system gets a ton of extra free publicity, while Nortel (who continues to lose market share) looks like a big bully. But at least their former subsidiary is using a Nortel system, right?
Bruce Stewart strokes his luxuriant facial hair:
It leaves me wondering what exactly the relationship between Blade and Nortel is right now (besides obviously a little strained). Blade is repeatedly referred to as a “former Nortel subsidiary,” but Tom’s latest post points our that Eric Schoch, the Vice President of Business Development for Nortel, currently serves on Blade’s board of directors, and that InternetNews.com reports that Nortel still has a minority interest in Blade. So if that’s the case, wouldn’t you think Blade should have been able to get a pretty good deal on a Nortel system in the first place?
Chuck LeDuc chortles:
This is especially funny since Nortel's big successes in the go-go 90s were selling switches to Baby Bells who defected from Western Electric when they needed more switches. For a while there it seemed like half the people I knew went to work at BNR/Northern Telecom/Nortel, and then just as quickly, none of them worked there anymore. The telecom boom died, and everybody had more than enough expensive circuit-switched almost-obsolete equipment depreciating noisily in their expensively airconditioned telecom equipment rooms ... Nortel could have ridden the wave of open source to become a new low-price leader, but instead seems intent on circling the wagons and riding its customer base down the drain.
And ... they apparently don't have any competent public relations staff. That's pathetic.
Lee Hopkins agrees:
If I hadn’t read this with my own eyes I wouldn’t have believed it. Talk about ‘clueless’ … a stunning example of why the blogospheric cultural precepts of ‘transparency, honesty and openness’ are held in such high regard, at least by us bloggers - corporations might not be so entranced by them ... so stunning in its idiocy in this age of lightning-speed, pan-global communication that you wonder if you are really reading an actual event, or something out of the keyboard of a third-rate business journalist.
...
Staggering reading. Blade made the decision to go crazy at the executive level and make three decisions within 24 hours - to return it, then to not return it, then to return it again, all the while proclaiming that no outside interference was impacting on their decision.
Andrew Hansen:
This will go down in the annals of 'stupid executive moves' of 2007.
Kudos to Fonality for winning the deal - the losers here are the guys at Blade, who will now not get a Fonality system, but an overpriced proprietary solution from Nortel. I am sure the shareholders of Blade will be happy to know they company is spending money for no reason whatsoever on communication costs twice!!
Here's geekwolf, with a perspective:
My company has an annex running on Asterisk (which Fonality’s system is based on) now, and we will likely be switching to it company-wide within the next year. While our current system isn’t Nortel, like its predecessor- it’s a closed-source proprietary system with terrible technical support that was discontinued by the manufacturer almost as soon as we bought it. There is no way in hell we would buy another proprietary phone system again.
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Asterisk is a dream come true for a lot of corporate IT/Telecom. departments. It is also running in a lot of geeks’ homes now (including mine). Frankly- if you’ve ever dealt with proprietary systems, and the limited configuration, logging, and reporting software available for them- Asterisk is a breeze. The great thing is- even if we buy an out-of-the-box system like Fonality’s PBXtra, if we aren’t happy with it- there are dozens of other vendors ... that will work with the existing VoIP phones and equipment. That’s powerful stuff.
But winkydink has some sympathy for Nortel and Blade:
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.
Here's roderickm, who'd like you to know that Fonality's Not All That:
Fonality is no more open than Cisco or other big telecom vendors that integrate -- but don't participate in -- open source. Fonality incorporates Asterisk, which is truly open source, but Fonality has never contributed anything back to the community. In fact, Fonality does all it can to minimize the role that Asterisk plays in its solution. The truth is that there would be no Fonality without Asterisk, and that Fonality (and Tom Keating) just say "open source" to get attention.
Trust Lehk228 to sum it all up:
So now instead of a few people reading about a company switching to asterisk, all of [us] read about how Nortel are a bunch of dicks. Nothing could possibly go wrong with this plan. Buffer overflow:
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RTFM on BCC bonus link:
Unsupported rapid oxidationRichi Jennings is an independent technology and marketing consultant, specializing in email, blogging, Linux, and computer security. A 20 year, cross-functional IT veteran, he is also an analyst at
Ferris Research. Contact Richi at blogwatch@richi.co.uk.