May 16, 2006 Toronto, Canada -- Nortel President and CEO Mike Zafirovski today announced a new business focus to improve the company's market share in metro Ethernet networks. Such networks will become more of an opportunity as they are re-engineered to handle the coming growth of video applications, Nortel believes.
Philippe Morin will lead Nortel's strategic initiative -- called "Metro Ethernet Networks," appropriately enough -- as president. Nortel expects the new initiative will enable to the company to offer "innovative Ethernet portfolios designed to deliver high quality, reliability, and security," in the words of a press release.
"Nortel's future depends on our continued leadership in innovation, and with our new Metro Ethernet Networks we're bringing our best technologies together, backed by an initial incremental investment in R&D," said Zafirovski. "In his previous position as general manager, optical, Philippe grew the business approximately 24 percent last year to US$1.2 billion. I have every confidence he will build on that leadership and momentum through Metro Ethernet Networks.
"With IPTV, IMS, and other applications evolving quickly, service providers will face huge bandwidth challenges across all networks -- wireless, wireline, and cable. Metro Ethernet Networks is the first step in getting Nortel in front of that curve to win in this critical new space in the market," Zafirovski concluded.
Nortel's Metro Ethernet Networks business strategy is based on the increasing reliance on Ethernet as the standard protocol for both LAN and WAN communications to break the bandwidth bottleneck between high-speed optical networks and metro networks serving consumers and business. In addition, Nortel's Metro Ethernet Networks will focus on wireless capabilities and the support of such applications as high-bandwidth video to provide real-time speed and quality to mobile devices.