Keeping Nortel's Pedal to the Metal
Back in 1995, Greg Mumford, then vice-president of Nortel Network Corp.'s (NT) optical unit, walked into a critical meeting with his boss, Ian A. Craig. Mumford had been pushing development of a new optical technology that would zap data across the network at 10 billion bits a second--four times as fast as anything then on the market. But customers were telling Nortel that they didn't need so much speed, and several Nortel execs were lobbying to cut back funding for the project, which had cost the company $100 million. Craig, a senior vice-president, had to make a decision. Mumford made a plea to keep the project going. ''Don't starve this thing,'' he recalls telling Craig.
Mumford won, and Nortel did too. It beat rivals to market with the gear in late 1996, just as Internet traffic was surging. Telecom carriers snapped it up. Today, Nortel commands a 45% share of the estimated $23.6 billion market for optical equipment, and its share is expected to hit 50% next year. The next largest competitor, Lucent Technologies Inc. (LU), has 25%. ''It was a brilliant move,'' admits Carl Russo, optical chief at rival Cisco Systems Inc.
Mumford isn't letting up. Recently promoted to president of the optical division, the exec's latest project is to crank up how fast data can be zipped along an optical fiber to 80 gigabits per second from the current 10 gigabits. That would boost capacity so that a single fiber could download the entire contents of the Library of Congress in 17 minutes. But no company would ever need that kind of speed. Would it? |
