As chief technology officer at Nortel Networks, John Roese oversees the work of 12,000 engineers and scientists, working with a $1.7-billion R&D budget.
And he has an avatar. It wears a suit. Mr. Roese's second-in-command also has an online presence, an avatar that typically shows up at Nortel virtual conferences wearing shorts and a T-shirt.
Why pay attention to the virtual lives of executives at Canada's star-crossed telecom hardware company? Isn't that whole avatar world on Second Life just a forum for online war games and cybersex?
Well, as the Street will find out at the June 11 analyst meeting, Nortel is in the midst of a corporate transformation. Mr. Roese is part of the team that CEO Mike Zafirovski assembled to shift the business mix from last-generation telecom infrastructure to next-generation IT communications. The two Nortel executives were at The Globe and Mail on Wednesday, honing their pitch.
The big push at Nortel is to transform a company that traditionally sold hardware to phone and wireless player into one that provides communications equipment and services across the spectrum of customers, all of whom embrace broadband and “hyperconnectivity.”
After two years at the helm, Mr. Zafirovski has fixed Nortel's well-documented internal problems, and is now trying to shift the focus to the company's prospects. The CEO sees Nortel becoming a central player in a rapidly expanding $1-trillion IT market, not a second-tier company in a telecom hardware market that's under intense margin pressure.
Mr. Zafirovski faces a challenge in selling this vision to investors, as Nortel stock has been a miserable performer. Which is where the avatars come in.
The fact that Mr. Roese and his team hold 200-person meetings in virtual forums speaks to the fact that a company perceived as stodgy is actually in step with the times.
Nortel's chief technology officer speaks with authority about the potential of virtual communities, about the potential for an authentic online world, as opposed to the assumed identities of Second Life, where most everyone is thin, young and not wearing suits. (One of the 1,000 recent graduates whom Nortel hired last year has got to give the boss some virtual fashion advice.)
Nortel's June 11 analyst presentation will focus on financial results, as these events do, with Mr. Zafirovski comparing his company's rising operating margins to the declining performance of peers. Nortel's CEO will talk about a governance culture that's producing reliable financial results, and a push to move far more swiftly from innovation to commercialization.
But Mike Z. may also want to trot out a few avatars, including that guy in shorts. They can only help the credibility of a company struggling to win back its reputation as a tech leader.
