1/9/2006 -- Lost in the pre-New Year’s exuberance, troubled networking giant Nortel Networks acquired Tasman Networks to shore up its shortcomings in the enterprise router segment. But while Tasman gives Nortel an immediate response to Cisco’s ISR offering, it doesn’t quite measure up to ISR in other respects.

“Nortel needed a technology solution to address the growing momentum and churn in the traditional enterprise access router market,” says Joel Conover, a principal analyst for enterprise infrastructure with Current Analysis. “While Nortel has long leveraged its [Contivity] VPN Router platform to provide converged routing and security, it needed a platform that offered more scalable packet routing performance and a more modular architecture to address the changing security, access and VoIP needs of enterprises more rapidly.”

Enter Tasman, says Conover, which -- to Nortel executives, anyway -- must’ve seemed like a back-ordered Christmas gift. “The Tasman portfolio of products gives Nortel an immediate tactical response to address the market opportunity that Cisco created with the introduction of the ISR, as well as a longer-term strategic platform Nortel can leverage to build an integrated enterprise branch routing strategy that could possibly include voice services,” he points out.

At the same time, Conover cautions, Nortel isn’t yet out of the woods. “[M]any challenges remain for Nortel to make the Tasman platform an effective competitor in the branch router market,” he argues, noting that the Tasman router lacks the security sophistication that Cisco’s routers offer. “Features such as IDS/IPS, advanced Layer 5 traffic classification, inspection, filtering, QoS and advanced transparent firewall proxies for some VoIP applications are notably missing from the Tasman platform today. These are just baseline features, not even taking into consideration Cisco’s many service modules for caching, WLAN, voice mail and wide area file services.”

In short, Conover concludes, Nortel’s Tasman acquisition is something of a mixed bag. “The Tasman router portfolio will give Nortel a strong competitive offering for customers that simply want a data router with basic security and virtual private networking capabilities,” he writes. “However, to address the market momentum that Cisco is building around the ISR, Nortel will need to do more, and it will need to do so quickly. Nortel’s entry into the access router market is critical to its own voice strategy, and as a credible IP routing vendor, Nortel also threatens to slow down the velocity that Cisco has been enjoying with the ISR, simply by offering an additional, credible choice in the market.” -Stephen Swoyer