"Chapter 11 is simply a restructuring tool, and Nortel is not going away," Victor Bohnert, the INNUA's executive director, said in an interview.

Nortel's filings "give me no pause at all," said Pierre-Eric Belzile, executive director of information and communication technology for the Montreal Canadiens hockey team. "I'm a big user and a big supporter."

The Canadiens recently installed IP phones from Nortel, and the team uses the vendor's gear to support a ticket-sales call center and the ticket-scanning system at the Bell Centre, its rink.

, an analyst at , said Nortel might not have had to seek protection from its creditors if the economy hadn't soured so sharply. But he gave the company a rating of just 4, on a scale of 1 to 10, for its technology innovation. "Where," he asked, "can Nortel lead?"

This version of the story originally appeared in Computerworld's print edition.