Service and support are the third most-important criteria for companies when selecting networking vendors. In this category, Cisco and HP provide a quick one-two punch at the top, scoring 7.9 and 7.8, respectively, followed by Nortel at 7.4. 3Com brings up the rear at 6.8, which apparently doesn't come as a surprise to the company. "We recognized earlier this year we weren't pleased with how we were being perceived from a service and support standpoint," 3Com's Freeze says.
3Com has taken steps to reverse its support problems. In September, it lured away Dell services marketing director Bob Riazzi and within the last year invested more than $10 million in a new tech-support and parts-logistics infrastructure, doubled stocking locations to create better turnaround, and increased training for the growing support team. It also has seen threefold improvements in the number of customer incidents it resolves within a day. "We're tracking our progress on a weekly basis," Freeze says.
Work To Do
Nortel, with its recent turmoil resulting from significant financial misreporting, may have the most work to do. The company ranks last in six of nine categories and third in two others; has comparably low scores in the areas of company stability, product performance/reliability, and manageability; and significantly lags in network-implementation services.
A shakeup is under way at Nortel. Since Michael Zafirovski took the reins as CEO in October, he has replaced several of the company's top execs with his own picks. "If you look at Nortel, obviously the last couple of years have been challenging for many reasons," says Phil Edholm, Nortel's chief technology officer. "But in the last month and a half, the company has had fundamental changes which should bode well for our enterprise customers." He and other Nortel executives have spent significant time with customers in recent weeks and have gotten positive feedback on company moves, including shifts toward wireless technologies and a stronger strategic focus on carrier and enterprise customers' needs, he adds.
Nortel has been moving within the past year to address manageability and network-implementation concerns, Edholm says. "There's significant increases in investment in manageability, in system-level tools," he says, citing Nortel's converged-network-management product for small business, which the company recently simplified. "Those are areas that I think we've recognized that we need to have more focus on." Nortel also added extensive features and functionality in its Enterprise Switch Manager 5.0, released in early September.
