Nortel Green Ad Campaign Takes Shot At Cisco

Nortel has launched an ad campaign that claims its data networking products offer energy savings over Cisco products, BtoB reports. The company has put together a Website to go along with the campaign.

Nortel says its Energy Efficiency Calculator (PDF info sheet) measures data network energy costs and identifies cost saving opportunities of working with Nortel. Using the NEEC, customers can compare the costs of using a Nortel data network device and a competitor’s.

This YouTube video is an advertisement on Nortel’s own YouTube home page, with charts and graphs demonstrating the benefits of using Nortel’s data network equipment in the areas of resiliency, performance, energy use and cost.

Nortel said the Tolly Group validated the NEEC and its claims that Nortel data switching products “use up to half the energy, offer 20 times the performance and are four-to-seven times more resilient than the primary competitor’s.”

Cisco is pushing back. Earlier this month at Interop, in response to comments from competitors about Nortel’s campaign, Marie Hattar, Cisco’s vice president of network systems and security, said, “We didn’t want to go with the ‘greenwashing’ treatment,” Computerworld reports.

Hattar said competitors who attack Cisco on power consumption have probably used Cisco’s data sheets for their comparisons, which, because of the way the company writes them, provides a “worst-case” consumption picture.

Cisco has announced that Miercom’s product test center gave the company its new “Certified Green” rating, the first products from any vendor to receive that certification. You can see video on it here.

It looks like the back and forth will continue. In a recent blog post Phil Edholm, responsible for technology vision, strategy, and architecture across Nortel’s enterprise product portfolio, wrote about what he calls “the Cisco Energy Tax.”

As I commented before, there is a real difference in the power consumption of Nortel data products and Cisco equivalent products. It is enough that if you replace all the Cisco gear in the world with Nortel products, it is equivalent to 20% of the US automobiles in carbon emissions.