John Wrona, executive vice president of sales and marketing at Nortel partner Ronco Communications, said he’s been hit up by AT&T, Avaya, Siemens and Cisco in the past month or so. Nortel’s shares have been trading at below a buck since November 7 and analysts predict the company will fold or be sold.

Earlier this week, Juniper sent a letter to Nortel partners urging them to consider an “additional” relationship with the networking company, though the letter avoided mentioning Nortel’s financial woes.

Cisco apparently hasn’t been so gentle.

“Cisco is sending us stuff and telling us that Nortel is going to go out of business,” Wrona said, explaining that Ronco was once a big Cisco reseller and is still a partner.

Nortel channel reaction to Juniper’s advances was lukewarm and Wrona said Ronco (which didn’t receive the letter from Juniper) won’t take these other offers seriously.

“We’re picking up Nortel accounts that are being abandoned by BlackBox Resale Services in Florida,” said Wrona, adding that Ronco expects to step in for a number of partners that will dump their Nortel accounts and some that are expected to go bankrupt.

“It is about account control in 2009 — offering good service and making sure things last longer. It’s going to be a flat year of sales but a strong year of service,” Wrona said.

Still Wrona is realistic about the long term with Nortel, saying the company has a 50-50 shot at survival.

“Whenever you go below a dollar per share it’s pretty scary and it makes a lot of large enterprise customers say ‘we can’t take them seriously,’” Wrona said.

Thursday, Zacks Investment Research downgraded Nortel to a “sell” saying there is no “near-term growth catalyst for the company.” The same day 24/7WallSt.com called Nortel CEO Mike Zafirovski one of 10 CEOs to go in 2009.

The acquisition went for an initial $1.35 million in cash and 30,770 shares, with a potential payout of $2.8 million if NetTeks hits performance targets. NetTeks saw revenue of approximately $12.7 million for the 12 months ending September 30, 2008.

INX is a Cisco gold partner with special certifications in unified communications (UC) and security. NetTeks, which has 32 employees, is a Cisco silver partner that was an early UC entrant, but is also a certified managed services provider.

Houston-based INX said acquiring NetTeks, which has offices in Boston and Glastonbury, Conn., will give it further entry into New England.

“This acquisition, coupled with our existing Boston operations, will create one of our largest regions. For the past eleven years NetTeks has developed close and longstanding relationships with many customers in the region and has built a reputation for excellence in project management and network engineering,” Mark Hilz, president and COO of INX, said in a statement. NetTeks has about 200 managed service customers.

INX gives NetTeks the kind of capital necessary to grow in customers and into new technologies, said former NetTeks president and CEO Ethan Simmons, who will now be vice president of New England sales for INX.

“INX’s national presence, as well as the expanded set of solutions focused around the data center, will provide our team with compelling additional capabilities for our customer set,” Simmons said.

This is the second major acquisition for INX in a little more than a year. Last year, INX acquired Cisco gold partner Select for $8.5 million. INX is among a handful of larger VARs moving in on smaller ones to gain regional ground and customer count.

A number of analysts have said that rough economic conditions would cause further VAR consolidation. This deal doesn’t appear to be the result of economic troubles since NetTeks was not in an apparent financial bind.

Even tech heavyweights such as Google, Apple and Yahoo are going topless in an effort to cut down on distractions. The problem? Meeting attendees in this increasingly wireless-connected world, spend group time texting or shopping when they should be paying attention. (Gulp…guilty.)

ABCNews.com also reports that laptops are verboten in some classrooms at the USC law school.

Note: Controversial American Apparel CEO Dov Charney never got the memo that toplessness was a metaphorical notion. In a wrongful termination suit, a former IT staffer charged that Charney held staff meetings while “completely naked” and “paraded in the workplace in his underwear.”

Nonetheless, the term “topless meeting” was a finalist in  the New Oxford American Dictionary’s Word of the Year for 2008 competition. For the record, it lost out to “hypermiler.”

 Thanks to eagle-eyed Elisa Gabbert for spotting this very important trend!

Most stunning about the announcement was that the first four employees to go were senior executives. Their departure is part of a plan to restructure the company into business units without a heavy corporate structure at the top, executives said.

It’s no wonder investors are betting on a sale of the company.

“Breaking up the corporate structure and pushing it into the business units sounds like they are preparing for a sale, not saving costs,” CreditSights analyst Ping Zhao told The Wall Street Journal. “Nortel is under pressure to sell itself in pieces.”

Rumors that either IBM or Microsoft would acquire Nortel have swirled for months. But now the question is whether Nortel’s business units will even be attractive enough.

For now Nortel CEO Mike Zafirovski denies acquisition rumors and said the restructuring will save money and make the company more nimble.

Ironically, most of the senior executives leaving were brought into Nortel to turn things around. Nortel never quite bounced back from the technology market bust in 2001.

Of the top executives leaving, CTO John Roese was the most surprising. Roese was recruited to help Nortel move into emerging technologies, ultimately changing the company’s position in the market. Roese posted his last blog on the Nortel site Monday.

“Intellectually, I feel that this is the right thing for Nortel because what the company needs more than anything else at this time is agility to maneuver in a complex market,” Roese wrote.

“Personally, I am comfortable with this direction even if I am not a part of the path forward. I was brought into Nortel to help correct many years of neglect on R&D and to get it into a position from a technology perspective where it could go forward. I believe that has been accomplished,” he continued.

Also leaving is chief marketing officer Lauren Flaherty, who was responsible for Nortel’s flashy David vs. Goliath campaign against Cisco. The campaign accused Cisco of placing an “energy tax” on enterprise users by not providing power savings. Flaherty spent 26 years at IBM, before coming to Nortel.

Global services president Dietmar Wendt and executive vice president of global sales Bill Nelson are also out. All of the executives will be gone by New Year.

In the meantime, Nortel is on a tear to convince customers that the company has enough cash on hand to continue servicing networks, and partners are still chugging along. It remains to be seen how much support partners will receive in coming months and what role they will play in Nortel’s turnaround — or ultimate sale.

Amidst all the cloud talk, there were a few deliverables mentioned in Monday’s keynotes including activation codes for four new Azure Services outlined by Microsoft chief software architect Ray Ozzie on Monday morning. Developers and VARs can use those codes to poke around and try out the hosted services.

Those services — hosted by Microsoft but available to participating developers — are Microsoft SQL Services that add reporting and other capabilities to the previously announced SQL Server Data Services; .NET Services including “.NET framework concepts” such as Windows Workflow (WF) and access control; Live Services for storing, sharing and synchronizing data and documents; SharePoint Services and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Services.

It was unclear from the various Ozzie, Bob Muglia and David Thompson speeches exactly which of the SQL Server data services (there will be many) will be accessible soon. This is another rolling rollout.

Muglia, the senior vice president of servers and tools, likened this PDC slate to the 1992 Professional Developers Conference where Windows NT was outlined. He was smart to steer clear of any mention of the past two PDCs and their Longhorn promises.

Throughout the session, which was streamed, the question was (and remains) what the toll will be for the use of this infrastructure. To borrow from an infamous quote attributed to former Microsoft exec Paul Maritz: “What’s the vig?”

Microsoft, the ultimate capitalist, isn’t doing this out of the goodness of its heart. The business model here is every bit as important as the technology — which remains unproven. Most likely it will come in and under price Amazon.com’s for-rent infrastructure.

Ozzie addressed that issue. Kind of. Basically, the business model remains under wraps and will evolve. Here’s the money quote (so to speak) from Ozzie:

“When it is released commercially, Windows Azure will have a very straightforward business model, with costs primarily being derived as a function of two key factors, and apps resource consumption and a specific service level that we agree to provide.

The pricing and models for all the Azure services will be competitive with the marketplace, and we’ll provide a variety of offers and service levels where there may be differentiated requirements across the breadth of developers and markets that we serve as a company from the individual developer to the enterprise.

Azure services offerings will be available directly through the Web and through existing channels and programs, and we’ll give you more details about our offerings as we get closer to commercial release.”

Ozzie was good enough to credit Amazon.com’s efforts from the stage, acknowledging that Microsoft and others would be standing on its shoulders going forward into this massive cloud.

UPDATE (10/28): Here’s what Muglia told The Wall Street Journal re: cloud pricing and profitability:

“As we start charging customers we will start to be able to make money,” Muglia said in an interview.

“We’re in investment mode now,” he added.  He said the service should be profitable fairly quickly.

Infra-Comm Corp. of San Juan Capistrano, Calif. also claims that Cisco violated a channel partner agreement by booting the silver-level VAR out of the channel program after it learned Infra-Comm owners Luke and Lisa Hosinski filed suit in January 2007.

According to the lawsuit, InfraComm registered the deal with Cisco in December 2005 for a six month protection period. Infra-Comm understood this deal to provide exclusive competitive pricing that would not be offered to competing partners.

In May 2006, Cisco told Infra-Comm the registration deal was set to expire, so Infra-Comm reregistered it in June and was quickly approved. But in July, Infra-Comm found out by logging on to the Cisco website that the registration deal had been nixed. Not long after, Infra-Comm learned that AT&T had been invited to the table, receiving the same or similar pricing.

Infra-Comm continued doing business with Cisco even after it filed suit in January 2007, and, in fact, renewed its channel partner agreement online in May 2007, receiving an automatic email confirmation. But then in June, Infra-Comm received notice that Cisco had terminated the relationship after all.

For its part, Cisco said the deal registration agreement required that Infra-Comm receive fair pricing for the customer, an unnamed real estate company. However, Cisco said, the customer chose on its own to go with AT&T and the deal registration agreement did not require Cisco to maintain a client exclusively for the solution provider in that situation.

Cisco also filed a cross-complaint in August 2007 against Infra-Comm, claiming the VAR offered Cisco Remote Operating Services to the customer in question, but didn’t pay Cisco about $100,000 owed for those services. In addition, Cisco claims that Infra-Comm intentionally interfered with Cisco extending a services contract with the customer.

When news of the lawsuit first broke in June, numerous channel partners working with Cisco and other leading vendors came out of the woodwork to say that they were not shocked by Infra-Comm’s claims and that they had experienced the same treatment many times over the years. Some partners interviewed said Cisco had gotten better over the years, but most said violation of channel partner agreements remains a problem with almost every company.

The judge in the case has forbidden both sides in the case from the talking to the press until the trial closes in about two weeks.

HP will integrate Colubris’ product line into ProCurve’s networking portfolio, and Colubris partners are invited to join the ProCurve channel, ProCurve said in a statement Wednesday afternoon.

It is still unclear whether there will be special training and certification for incoming Colubris channel partners or whether they will maintain their previous status in the channel. An HP ProCurve spokesperson said Wednesday evening that the company will update partners with specifics as soon as the product roadmap is finalized.

ProCurve will continue to offer its own mobility products in addition to Colubris’ Intelligent Mobility Solution. That way partners can offer integrated and overlay technology. Existing ProCurve and Colubris users will continue to receive customer support for both product lines.

HP first announced it would acquire Colubris in August, aiming to round out ProCurve’s existing wireless portfolio with Colubris’ 802.11n technology, management and security products. ProCurve said at the time that Colubris would help it penetrate vertical markets, such as hospitality, transportation, healthcare, manufacturing and education.

When the acquisition was first announced, Colubris partners said they were hopeful about joining the ProCurve team, but wanted to be sure they received the same “great service” that Colubris had given them.

These days competition is tough in the wireless LAN (WLAN) market, so HP ProCurve will have to work swiftly to ensure that there are no bumps in the road toward channel or product integration.

Already one of the few remaining independent WLAN players, Ruckus Wireless, is offering an incentive program that compensates partners for convincing customers of Colubris and Trapeze Networks to trade out their existing equipment for Ruckus’ 802.11n technology at dirt cheap prices. Trapeze was recently acquired by Belden Cable.

That move could be seen as a threat or an act of desperation at a time when independent WLAN players are being snapped up by larger companies quickly, leaving only a few smaller players behind. Companies like Colubris and Trapeze are now part of mega-channels that could easily crush independent competitors. Nevertheless, Ruckus is gambling that partners from these formerly independent players will become disgruntled as they get folded into larger companies that pay them less attention.

Financial terms of the ProCurve-Colubris deal have not yet been disclosed and are not required to be since Colubris was a private company.

Coopetition is a grand ol’ tradition in tech. Several years ago, while talking up his company’s desire to suck up more revenue from its own storage management, analytics and other offerings, Ellison warned applications, storage management and BI rivals that mined the Oracle’s installed base, to get out of his backyard.  Two of the companies he was shaking his fist at were Siebel Systems and BEA. And guess where they are now.

And so, with HP, Oracle is taking on Sun (which has its own data warehouse appliance work going on with Green Plum), NetApp and others even as those companies helped pay the Oracle OpenWorld bills.

Terms of the deal have not yet been announced. Cisco executives were unavailable to discuss the impact of the deal on Cisco or Jabber partners.

Though Cisco already owns instant messaging and presence features, Jabber’s applications are open source and based on its own Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP). These applications are therefore easier to integrate into emailing, calendaring and other Web 2.0 software across the board, giving Cisco a leg up in the collaboration race against Microsoft and IBM.

Cisco said in a statement that the Jabber acquisition would enable presence and messaging to be used in WebEx Connect and its UC platform to provide both “on-premise and on-demand solutions.” Cisco executives said in August they would make Webex collaboration announcements this month, and those will also likely be part of this collaboration strategy.

“Enterprise organizations want an extensible presence and messaging platform that can integrate with business process applications and easily adapt to their changing needs,” said Doug Dennerline, Cisco senior vice president of the collaboration software group, in a statement. “Our intention is to be the interoperability benchmark in the collaboration space.”

Cisco is not actually leading the way when it comes to open source collaboration, since, for example, Novell’s Teaming collaboration offering is open source and can integrate into most emailing, calendaring and enterprise 2.0 applications.

Also, Cisco is not alone in identifying collaboration as a space for immediate movement. Last week, IBM announced an expansion of its enterprise Web 2.0 strategy, which will enable social software platform Lotus Connections to integrate into iEnterprises’ CRM software, as well include new mashup capabilities. IBM also announced The Center for Social Software, a social software research center that will serve as the incubator for new enterprise 2.0 products.

For Cisco, the Jabber acquisition also brings a new set of customers to maintain and possibly up-sell. The Department of Homeland Security, Wells Fargo and FedEx are just a few of Jabber’s extensive list of major customers that have both implemented its products and built up customized applications based on XMPP.

“This isn’t just a technology, this is an ecosystem,” said Peter O’Kelly, principal analyst at O’Kelly Consulting. “It’s in Cisco’s best interest to keep that vibrant community.”

O’Kelly added that Cisco has a good track record of acquiring companies and “not breaking them.”

The Jabber acquisition is expected to close in the first half of fiscal year 2009. Upon the deal’s close, Jabber employees will be incorporated into the Cisco Collaboration Software Group.

Inside, I realized the heels were heading to a very lively couture show while I was heading to a pretty slow and somber Interop. And in order to get there, I had to pass under the mammoth television monitor booming Bloomberg News and its reports of plunging markets and failing banks.

It’s unclear whether sour economic news or skyrocketing airfares were contributors, but there were times that the Interop show floor was so quiet you could whisper sweet nothings. Not that you should ever do that on a trade show floor.

It should be noted that Interop Las Vegas in the spring was huge and booming, and that Interop New York is traditionally smaller than its casino-like cousin. But there was something else going on.

As one vendor on the show floor prattled on about greening IT, I realized how bizarre it was to have that conversation under hot lights on a trade show floor with buzzing display monitors, loud speakers and makeshift servers scattered about. The place was a power-guzzling pit. And that’s not to mention all the gas wasted on air travel and shipping thousands of pounds of cardboard, plastic and random race cars for booth displays.

One Cisco executive put it best.

“We don’t do these tradeshows the way we used to. Cisco does a lot of it virtually now. And we use our own technology like telepresence to meet with people. Folks are crunched to travel,” he said.

The executive and I then reminisced about the days of Supercomm and Interop old when vendors had dual-floor booths (some with mini-elevators built in). Cisco’s booth at Interop New York was large but bare bones.

Still, there is something to be said for the human touch. It allows for the surprise meeting, the fervent sales pitch and the heated conference session debate. And all of that was alive and well at Interop New York. In fact, twice I heard someone standing at a booth saying something like, “I think that application might work for us.”

My personal Interop human touch highlights were:

In the last hour of the final day of the show, exhausted and grumpy, I came across kablink, the open source collaboration project that is the basis of Novell’s Teaming offering. With a limited marketing budget and only a couple of sets of feet on the road, kablink’s “community guy” Brent McConnell (that’s really his title) would never have otherwise been able to show me all of the cool mashup capabilities and integrated application potential kablink has to offer.

I also got a chance to sit in a quiet conference room with ProCurve distinguished technologist Manfred Arndt to learn about implementing power over Ethernet (PoE) for VoIP phones and the need to build vendor ecosystems to cross-certify product for complicated unified communications and collaboration solutions.

In the end, the answer to the question of whether tradeshows will — or should — die is: Maybe not. Maybe they should just tone down and thin out.