Nortel defends its services U-turn

Vendor reassures channel of its services strength despite axing dedicated service arm

Telecommunications vendor Nortel has claimed its short-lived Global Services arm achieved what it set out to do and has reassured UK VARs it still has a strong services offering.

In March 2006, the company announced the Global Services division would operate as a standalone unit selling services previously offered by the individual enterprise and carrier product groups.

Calum Byers, Nortel’s EMEA leader of services, declined to comment on whether or not any redundancies had been made in the vendor’s UK services team.

“The division will no longer exist in its current form and we are realigning staff,” he said. “A portion will go to the enterprise business and others will go to the carrier business.”

Services previously represented a fifth of Nortel’s revenues and chief executive Mike Zafirovski wanted to boost this by as much as 100 per cent by hiving off its services capabilities.

“It was a great success in terms of significantly increasing the visibility of services,” said Byers.

He also said the firm’s UK VARs would be unaffected. “We will continue to have a strong services offering.”

Peter Titmus, managing director of support services specialist Networks First, said: “Hopefully this will rationalise and clarify things. If Nortel puts some expert services guys into their enterprise division they will have more empathy with what the channel is trying to do.”