Nortel have appointed Tony Burrows to build Nortel’s share of the education market. While not as well known as Cicso, Nortel are a huge company with a large share of the US and UK HE markets. Quite how they will approach the education market is not clear but after speaking to Tony Burrows it sounds like they will use some sort of narrow guerrilla strategy to try and create awareness and opportunities in the local market.

At a technical level Nortel will be trying to leverage their leadership in Session Initiated Protocol (SIP), which allows interactive communications by users on any IP network, regardless of whether they are using telephones, computers, handheld devices, instant messaging systems, etc. The bottom line seems to be that SIP focuses on people rather than the devices they use. This sounds and probably is very complicated and Tony’s team have a huge job taking on Cisco who dominate this area in education. We shall keep an eye out to see how this battle evolves.

• www.cisco.com

• www.nortel.com