Nortel and Damovo put pen to paper

Damovo and Nortel have signed a three-year global agreement following negotiations revealed exclusively by vnunet.com last month.

The companies, which have been working together on an informal deal-by-deal basis, last week agreed a formal international reseller arrangement.

Damovo said that it had already enjoyed success with Nortel sales in parts of Europe.

The pair have been in talks over the past 12 months, and have now agreed to sell Nortel's enterprise portfolio throughout the world. The deal covers voice, data and converged equipment.

"We have been successful with Nortel in central and eastern Europe but we have plans to expand this globally," said Ian Marshall, global partner and alliance executive at Damovo.

There had been industry speculation that Damovo was unhappy with Cisco being "too demanding". But Marshall insisted that the move reflects a strategy of vendor independence and is not related to the performance of existing vendor partnerships.

"This is not a reaction to any situation with existing partners because we are looking to grow our business and Nortel will enable us to offer customers more choice," he said.

The systems integrator, which spun out of Ericsson in 2001, currently works with vendors such as Cisco, Ericsson, Extreme Networks and Mitel.

Adrian Marsh, director of EMEA channels at Nortel, explained that central and eastern Europe are high growth areas that offer a "win, win situation for both companies".

He expects Damovo's size and coverage to offer large customers a good option for networking products and services.

"A lot of global organisations are looking for channels that can work with them over a wide variety of products and regions," said Marsh.

Damovo will be given the opportunity to buy direct from Nortel but Marsh acknowledged that distributors are often the preferred source.

"Partners that have the option to buy direct usually still buy from distributors," he said.