While Lucent and other rivals stumble, Nortel is emerging as the Old Economy telecom gear maker that is leading the charge into the Internet Age. At its heart, Roth is using the Net to emphasize speed as never before. He has, for example, created small work groups that use customized Web portals to share ideas and documents. That makes it a snap for software developers in Canada or India to collaborate. The average time to develop a new product is down to 24 weeks, from the 240 weeks it used to take.
Special orders are on a fast track, too.
Customers can deliver details of products they need directly to Nortel engineers through a company extranet, cutting production time from three months to a day. ''We've shifted from telco time to Web speed,'' Roth says. And while others were easing into their lawn chairs this summer, Roth launched an electronic marketplace, called e2open, that informs its 72 suppliers the minute the company receives an order. That way, suppliers can quickly start making or shipping the components Nortel will need. Just since the July launch, the system has allowed Nortel to ship everything from switches to optical gear in half the time it used to take. Look who's laughing now.