Nortel filed for bankruptcy protection today, according to the Globe and Mail. At the peak of the tech boom, Nortel was Canada’s largest company, accounting for nearly a third of the total value of the Toronto Stock Exchange. Now, it’s a fire sale, as the company will have to sell of key networking assets.

In addition to selling the Ethernet unit, divisions that could go on the auction block include the carrier networks unit, which sells gear to phone companies, and the enterprise division that sells telecom equipment to businesses. Potential buyers for these units are all foreign [to Canada]: Nokia Siemens Networks, Telefon AB LM Ericsson, Cisco Systems Inc. and China's Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd.

The biggest problem is that Nortel suffered a large drop in orders from phone company clients as the economy cratered.

The question then remains: Where does this leave companies that bought Nortel’s networking and unified communications equipment? What may end up happening is that monitoring and maintaining Nortel’s equipment may have to come down to vendor neutral products, as it is unlikely that Nortel will continue to support equipment from a division that they no longer own.

Tracking network response times and quality of service of unified communications becomes more important when dealing with a defunct vendor’s equipment – you need to be proactive and head problems off quickly, because there’s no external vendor to go to for help – or to assign blame.

There’s another point in here: relying on network equipment providers for management has generally been a troublesome approach because network equipment providers typically only manage their stuff and heterogeneous environments are the norm. Secondly, management is not the network equipment provider’s core competency.

The result can be a collection of sub-par management tools and no standardization. Large enterprises have known this for a while but smaller companies that have managed to stay with a single network equipment provider and make do with their management tools should now be taking a harder look at diversification at vendor neutral management strategies and products.

This article was created with the input of Patrick Ancipink and Ben Erwin.