Genband chief welcomes Nortel workers

One of the first to make a move was Genband, a small, privately held Texas company specializing in Internet technology used by telecommunications companies. Genband CEO Charles Vogt phoned Nortel's then-CEO Mike Zafirovski with a proposition: Genband would like to buy Nortel's CVAS business and its technology that sends phone calls over the Internet.

"From Day One, we told Mike Z. the best value they could possibly get is to carve out CVAS," Vogt told several hundred Genband workers, referring to Nortel's Carrier VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) and Applications Solutionsunit.

The CVAS unit is one of numerous business divisions Nortel put up for sale in the past 18 months. During that time, as bids were filed with the bankruptcy court, Nortel continued shedding hundreds of workers and cutting off their severance payments.

Those who emerged from the ordeal with a job represent a dwindling portion of the 10,000 people who once worked here for Nortel, the century-old Canadian maker of phone switches and routers.

The business unit employed 3,500 at its peak before Nortel began jettisoning workers in a bid to keep solvent. When Genband bought theunit, nearly 400 were laid off because of redundancies.

Barnhill said two of the most difficult layoffs he had to make were the final two, just weeks before the CVAS unit became part of Genband. He said he understands there can be no guarantees in the volatile realm of telecommunications, but he said things can only get better for him and his Genband colleagues.

Genband's long-term business strategy is based on replacing its customers' legacy switches with software-based upgrades that require less hardware and are more efficient. Acquiring Nortel's customer base is a "golden nugget" for Genband, giving the company 22 percent market share in carrier VoIP equipment, an analyst for Infonetics Research wrote.

The old analog

Vogt said about 85 percent of communications networks still depend on the old analog and digital switches, which will need to be upgraded over the next decade for phone carriers, cable providers and Internet companies to process the gargantuan quantities of data, games and video that consumers want to send.