Nortel talks up future with Bay

Barely a day after completing its multibillion dollar corporate marriage with Bay Networks, Nortel has been boasting it can now offer a broader range of technologies than other telecoms and networking equipment suppliers.

John Roth, Nortel vice president and CEO, said the company was attracted to Bay because it recognised "IP (Internet Protocol) networking and data technologies are becoming an important part of Nortel's customers' future networks".

Dave House, former Bay Networks CEO and now Nortel president, claimed the telecoms culture of fault tolerance which Nortel has traditionally dealt with will not be a problem for Bay. He said: "It's not the same as carrier telephony, but Bay had a reputation for high availability. For example, at the New York Stock Exchange we had 99.994 network uptime."

Roth added: "We were impressed Bay Networks turned up in banks, railroads - it's a good fit with Nortel."

When asked which companies will be the 'new' Nortel's biggest rivals, Roth said Lucent would provide a challenge, but then broke down the rest of the field according to technologies: Alcatel and Fujitsu for fibre optics, Ericsson for wireless products, and Cisco and Ascend for packet switched technologies.

When announced just over two months ago, the merger was said to be worth $9.1bn, but after taking into account one-time charges and the decline in stock prices in recent weeks, Nortel may only end up paying about $7bn, Roth said.