Dooley has been a Nortel customer for a dozen years and has found that the company has a good "evergreen" philosophy with products put out to pasture. "What keeps you as a user is that they always find a way to take care of you even when they go to end-of-lifing a product," Dooley said. He is director of telecommunications and special projects for the Plano, Texas, Independent School District, which serves 51,000 students and 8,000 teachers with Nortel telecommunications equipment at 78 sites. The equipment runs over a fiber link between sites and was considered the Cadillac of networking gear when it was installed, he said.

Absent details about the discontinued products and three others put on a "scope reduction" list, Bohnert said that in general "there is optimism in the Nortel customer base. Customers finally feel Nortel is taking control of its sales channels and that Nortel leaders are concerned about aggressively defending their market share.

"Nortel customers are very loyal and feel Nortel flat out makes the best products, even though Nortel has stumbled with its financial challenges," he said. "Mike [Zafirovski] is playing to win."

In addition to the cuts, Zafirovski also announced a new Metro Ethernet Networks unit, as well as $167 million more in research and development for three product areas: IP Multimedia Subsystems, WiMax and IPTV.

The six programs or products Nortel is exiting cost Nortel $73 million in R&D last year; the three on the scope reduction list will cut an $80 million R&D investment last year to about $40 million this year, Zafirovski said. The sale of Nortel's blade server unit and the proposed sale of another unnamed unit will also trim another $11 million in R&D spending. That savings, however, will be offset by the acquisition earlier this year of Tasman Networks Inc. in San Jose, he said.