LAS VEGAS -- Hot data-center trends in virtualization and energy efficiency, combined with the bearish economy, add up to opportunity for Nortel, according to the vendor's enterprise chief.

Virtualization is an extension of the "purpose built" unified-communications infrastructure Nortel is building, with Microsoft's help, says Joel Hackney, president of Nortel's Enterprise business. Nortel claims that recent studies show its switches and routers are as much as 50% more energy efficient than competitive offerings.

This aspect has helped the company land 50 recent enterprise wins, Hackney says. It's also playing a key role in helping Nortel create demand during a recessionary economy marked by reduced spending on enterprise IT, he says.

"The opportunity we see in the marketplace today is simplifying networks," Hackney says. "Customers are looking for a choice. We have the opportunity for growth as the No. 2 player going against a very large market-share [leader].”

Nortel has been struggling to gain share against Cisco in the enterprise, particularly in Ethernet switching. The company has fared better in VoIP and has high hopes that its alliance with Microsoft for unified communications will make significant inroads.

At Interop this week, Nortel unveiled the VSS 5000, a switch designed to virtualize services provided by devices including firewalls, application switches and SSL-acceleration appliances. The VSS 5000 switch consolidates and virtualizes these functions into a single device, then orchestrates and provisions services to different enterprise departments or workgroups.

Nortel also may be looking to strengthen partnerships with data-center server- and storage-software vendors like VMware in an effort to entrench itself deeper in the virtualization opportunity, Hackney says.

"We have very strong dialogues with VMware," Hackney says. "Our teams are very tightly linked in terms of common vision, common strategy."

Cisco has an equity stake in VMware, and Enterasys plans to ally with the vendor and Dell on a virtual-data-center design campaign later this year.

Green initiatives in the data center also open up opportunity for Nortel, Hackney claims. The company said recent tests conducted by Tolly Group and InfoTech, commissioned by Nortel, found Nortel products to offer 20 times the performance and seven times the resiliency and to consume half the energy of competitive offerings.