Who is nortel now

Nortel suffered another Huawei blow, on home turf no less. In , the Chinese firm bested it to win a major contract with Telus and Bell.

In January, , Nortel filed for bankruptcy protection. Even then, Huawei figured in its story. A group of former Nortel executives, convinced the company could be turned around with better management, put together a buy-out bid. It would be backed, the Ottawa Citizen reported, by Huawei acting as a minority shareholder. Ren has offered a different version of events, telling the Globe and Mail last year he was interested in buying Nortel, but that the plan died after the nearly insolvent Nortel said it wanted a controlling share of Huawei.

When the intelligence agency warned the company, it all but ignored CSIS. This led Juneau-Katsuya to a startling conclusion:. A little later, around , U. It involved Huawei itself, say three former employees. With an office across the freeway from a Nortel facility in Texas, Huawei returned a fibre card — essentially a computer device — used in Nortel data switches and asked for a refund, recalls Lawrence Bill, a forensic analyst who worked on the subsequent investigation.

Former colleagues Tony Anastasio and Brian Shields confirmed the incident, though say they recall it was a front company that had bought the equipment and passed it on to Huawei. Meanwhile, the company started noticing knock-off versions of some of its products in Asian markets, he says.

Nortel considered suing, but dropped the matter after the Huawei office across the road in Texas closed down, says Bill. Velshi says he asked counterparts in Huawei around the world if they knew anything about such an episode 20 years ago and came up blank. The Canadian government has never accused it of anything like that, he says.

It first came to light in the spring of when a Nortel employee in the U. The Brit helpfully emailed the manager — optical-networks president Brian McFadden — to say he was available to answer any questions McFadden might have about the material. Larry Bill, based in Raleigh, noticed a troubling fact: Logs indicated that McFadden had signed into the Nortel system from multiple locations around the world, places he had never visited. Security advisor Brian Shields discovered that not one, but seven Nortel executives, including CEO Frank Dunn, had been hacked, and that the hackers were vacuuming an alarming volume of sensitive material out of its databases.

By the end of his investigation, Shields says he was able to track the theft of over 1, documents from the LiveLink server, and that was only during a six-month period when bosses allowed him to monitor the stealing. He says it lasted past , when he was laid off. Gross and Newbould jointly oversaw a unique cross-border trial in to decide how to divide the liquidation funds.

The judges ruled in that creditors of every estate should get roughly equal repayment. That sparked appeals and a settlement last year. She plotted an…. Promoted Sponsored. Nov 9, Nov 6, Why an employer-sponsored retirement plan should be in your recruitment toolbox.

Nov 5, Getting employees off the screen and into the office. Pythian, a database company, added hundreds of staff. Mitel began a string of acquisitions. Also, Nortel sold its assets at such bargain basement prices that the buyers — most notably optical communications specialist Ciena — could afford to take the time necessary to properly integrate the businesses. Not all of it is being generated by high-tech. Cannabis giant Canopy Growth has hired a couple of hundred workers for its Kanata operation.

Thousands of federal government employees have moved into Kanata and commute east. Robert Wang, the founder and CEO of Instant Brands — maker of the smart appliance everyone knows as Instant Pot — spent four years at Nortel during the late s boom.

Former Nortel managers fund startups and guide entrepreneurs through their participation on company boards. Len Anderson, a former Nortel employee, runs a Kanata business that refurbishes aging communications networks, many of them with the Nortel logo. Even so, neither the alumni or the flourishing of small startups have made up for the losses at Nortel, either in terms of head count or the intangibles associated with having an anchor tenant with a global brand name.

Nearly everyone associated with the company recalls their shock at the news of the bankruptcy filing. But within the enterprise, there was rot. Not with the accounting — a yearlong criminal trial ending six years ago would determine that top executives did not cook the books. No, the weakness was in the structure of the company and in the vision of those who led it.

Kunis calculated that Nortel was No. In the world of telecommunications gear, the global lead for wireless technology lay with Ericsson while Cisco was tops in internet gear. Huawei, the Chinese telecom champion, was the emerging leader in low-cost telecom equipment across the board.