In the Spotlight: Nortel’s Philippe Morin

Philippe Morin, the former president of Nortel Networks’ optical business, was named the head of its newly created Metro Ethernet group yesterday. He spoke to Telephony’s Ed Gubbins later that day.

On the new Metro Ethernet group: It’s going to be a separate business unit starting in the third quarter, with dedicated research and development, marketing and product management folks reporting directly to [Nortel CEO] Mike Zafirovski. We’re putting different business units into one organization: the optical unit, the carrier data organization, the carrier Ethernet organization and the broadband access group.

On key products in the group: You’ve got the MRS8600, the multiservice switches, the edge products, the old Passport 15000--these were the old names, branded a year and a half ago. In addition, a lot of the optical portfolio: the OME 6500, the CPL, the OME 5000.

On the metro Ethernet market: The market still needs to be better defined. Different analysts have different definitions. It’s much greater than Ethernet over Sonet or over fiber. As you see the explosion of bandwidth, whether you’re talking about wireless backhaul, video, downloading songs--it’s going to be a network requirement that will include optical devices in addition to Ethernet functionality. How do you define the metro Ethernet market, how do you become strong [in it] and get at least 20% marketshare is one of the targets we’ve got.

On Nortel’s market share: We’ve got over 20% of the Ethernet-over-DWDM, Ethernet-over-Sonet and Ethernet-over-RPR markets. We’ve got over 20% share in metro DWDM and long haul.