gogoGophers

soop,

Maybe you will get other opiniions, but my experience is that the Nortel site is locked down. My company is a channel partner. If I lost my job and the passwords and access codes were made invalid, I would know of no way to access the info you seek. Sorry.

Ramjet

I am going to bite on this one! This will give me a chance to rant a bit. It seems that Nortel is getting harder by the day to deal with. Now, if you are not an Advantage Partner, they are going to charge for tech support. I personally have 2 id's to call into Nortel for trouble. 1 for N* and 1 for CS1000. It seems they changed my personal pin number and didn't notify me. It took 2 days to get a ticket opened for a patch install. That said, if you look at their stock and all the trouble we are haveing getting help when needed, I feel Nortel is on their way out. Yes, there products work, and are very trouble free. But they are pricing themselves out of the market. My distributor price now for a T7316e is up to 161.00. How in the hell can you make anything selling their stuff when you can't mark it up. I run across other's that buy on the "Gray Market", and they are selling T7316e's for 155.00. We cannot compete if we buy from Nortel the way we are supposed
to. Now Nortel is in bed with LG. LG is the parent company of Vodavi. What's up with that? Some of the stuff they are putting out looks just like the Vodavi stuff, and all of the sets, and some of the stuff looks like the BCM 50. I guess I'm just tired of f-----g with them and trying to price a system and still make a little when the next guy is going to circumvent the system and buy off the gray market. If Nortel was really serious about the problem, they could put a stop to it right away.
Anyway, to answer your question, you call the company that you purchased your "Gray Market" Nortel products from and let them provide your tech support. They have "overseas" distributors that they are buying from that have access to the tech support folks.

Do I fell better now that I have said this? Hell no!

__________________
Two snips, a snort, a turn, a fly, and a grunt, and it was so simple, like the jitterbug, it plum evaded me!

sooperbohl

Guys I agree with both of you on this matter. Looks like the big N is wanting to walk off a cliff like others before them. I guess that can be blamed on bad leadership at the top who seem to have no idea how to retain market share. What the heck are they teaching in business school. I believe it N wants to get back up on top of the heap of competitors out there, they better get some fresh ideas and some new blood at the top or on to the next and greatest is how I see it. Thanks guys for your reply.

Soop

bhouse

I do have something to add to all this, being that I have watched closely (as a result of being very close to) this situation morph over the last 5 years+. I see some of the points on both sides of the argument

Nortel in all of their infinite wisdom attempted in many ways to stop the grey market activities. By adding tighter controls on whom they will give support to, "partnering" with some of the large grey market remanufacturers (I refer to buying/reselling their products and in some cases selling portions of their business to) and refusing to sell to those distributors/resellers that don't only sell Nortel remanufactured products (that they may have purchased themselves), or deal in grey market goods.

Nortel has tried this rather monopolistic tactic, in order to keep their high mark-up (for some equipment manufactured in Mexico, is huge), and their corner of the market, and make a few extra bucks on supporting their equipment along the way. The problem is, it only drives these activities further and (with other factors like the explosion of the web) makes it easy for these guys to reman equipment in their garage and resell. Nortel was unable to give an advantage to a "legitimate" reseller, making it appealing to utilize the already existant channels.

So who wins from purchasing the product through Nortel? Where is the win-win?

With the movement towards VoIP systems, dinosaurs like Nortel not adopting industry standards (and there isn't just a dozen real players anymore) may have to make way for others in the SMB market that offer a far more economical and practical solution (some cases open-source).

Should be an interesting couple of years.

iceman74

Guys I agree there is a problem with the Nortel website it isn't very user friendly and maybe I am lucky cuz we are a channel partner but what I have found what works is to befriend some of the support guys when you have the odd chance on an escallation and then get them to support you. I must admit I have dealt with siemens as well and trust me for us here in SA Nortel is a breeze when it comes to the siemens guys. thats just my experience on the BCM side.