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Nortel Presses Unified Communications

Business VoIP

Business VoIPBusiness VoIPBusiness VoIP
June 21, 2007

Nortel Presses Unified Communications



By Greg Galitzine
Group Editorial Director

Nortel recently held a press and analyst unified communications event in Tampa during the INNUA Global Connect gathering. INNUA is the International Nortel Networks Users Association.
 
Enterprise Growth
The day kicked off with opening remarks from Wes Durow, who is Nortel’s VP, Enterprise Solutions Global Product Marketing. Wes spoke of the success that Nortel’s enterprise group is enjoying, including growth of 34% in the second half of last year and Q107 growth of 31%.

 
Wes introduced the assembled Nortel general mangers as well as the guests from IBM (News - Alert) and Microsoft, and with that he handed the reigns to Paul Templeton, GM, Enterprise Voice for Nortel.
 
Paul echoed Wes’ earlier comments by stating that “The enterprise business is rocking at the moment.”
 
He explained that the opportunity was very great right now, and laid out several trends shaping the market.
 
He spoke of a converging of three megatrends: Hyperconnectivity (Nortel defines hyperconnectivity as the state in which the number of devices, nodes, and applications connected to the network far exceeds the number of people using the network); True broadband; and Communications enabled applications.
 
Templeton discussed the evolution of the industry as well. “IP Telephony is evolving to unified communications as a software application as enterprises adopt service oriented architecture (SOA) to increase their business agility,” he said.
 
Thus is created a transformational opportunity for the enterprise.
 
Unified Communications is among the pillars of Nortel’s enterprise business, and together with application aware networks, applications convergence and the rise of integration services, this is how Nortel plans to enable business convergence.
 
Templeton further elaborated on Nortel’s strategy, and showed how the industry has moved through several phases en route to business convergence. First, we had network convergence as IP telephony was deployed, driven in part by a desire for operational cost reduction. The second phase (where we find ourselves today) was what he called “communications convergence” and that was defined by SIP and mobility, and the desire to enhance productivity, by giving users access via any device from any place. The third phase is of course business convergence itself, marked by the adoption of truly open platforms, enabling innovation and creativity in the form of interoperability and business application integration leading to business process automation.
 
Templeton noted that partnerships with companies like IBM are enabling Nortel to move ahead in new and exciting directions.
 
“Nortel is turning our bundled telephony solutions on their side,” he said, “as we move towards becoming a best of breed software and services provider.”
 
“The professional services business is growing,” he added.
 
VANOC
At the conclusion of Templeton’s remarks, it was time to adjourn to the keynote, delivered by featured guest Ward Chapin, the CIO of the Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC) for the 2010 Olympic Games.
 
For those wondering why a Nortel event would feature a speaker from Vancouver’s Olympic Committee, it should be noted that Nortel has been tapped as the Official Converged Network Equipment Supplier for the 2010 Winter Games. As part of the sponsorship agreement, Nortel will supply the network communications equipment required for what will be the first all-IP converged Games network.
 
Nortel will be providing the converged local area network (LAN) equipment to VANOC at 15 Games venues in both Vancouver and Whistler, as well as at the Vancouver 2010 headquarters and numerous supporting venues.
 
In addition, Bell Canada earlier selected Nortel to supply the wide area network (WAN) equipment it will use to build a core network to enable secure and reliable communications among all event locations.
 
Thus Nortel will be responsible for providing a complete end-to-end solution for the 2010 Winter Games, and delivering the first IP Olympics, as it were.
 
Chapin spoke of the massive undertaking that was before him and his team of several hundred. Among the challenges? Growing the team to over 1,400 by the time the Games roll around. The key issues he said, revolve around planning and integration — not technology. In fact there will be “no bleeding edge… only mature proven technology to deliver reliability.”
 
Chapin said that he and his team were impressed with Nortel’s bid, and that the company was “passionate about what they were doing.” He mentioned Nortel’s “great products” and how their solutions delivered a “comfort zone” to his team as reasons for selecting the equipment provider. That coupled with Bell Canada’s selection of Nortel made the decision easier. Lastly, Chapin said that selecting Nortel made for “a great Canadian story.”
 
Chapin closed with an inspirational video, which the audience simply loved. In fact during the Q&A following the keynote, a young lady, obviously moved by the video, asked where she could sign up as a volunteer to help out in Vancouver 2010.
 
UC 1-2-3
Next on the agenda was Net Payne, vice president of North American Enterprise marketing for Nortel, who spoke about Nortel’s newly launched UC 1-2-3 initiative, which will be generally available as of July 2, 2007.
 
Nortel’s UC 1-2-3 program is designed to make it simpler for customers to order a Unified Communications solution from Nortel. The initiative, a successor to the company’s IPT 1-2-3 program, is set up to “streamline the process of selecting, purchasing and deploying a UC solution with pre-engineered, pre-configured packages and enhanced sales tools that simplify the quoting and ordering process.”
 
Payne brought up the topic of hyperconnectivity once again, and elaborated on it with a slight twist on the aforementioned definition. Said Payne, “Hyperconnectivity is a trend whereby anything that can be connected to the network, will be connected to the network. This includes person to person communications, person to machine, and increasingly, machine to machine.”
 
“Unified communications is the solution for a hyperconnected world,” he continued, “and we’re starting to deliver on that: any time, any place, any device.”
 
Nortel & IBM
Nortel also used their Global Connect event as a forum to announce their partnership with IBM to deliver unified communications solutions to SMBs. Lori McLean, a Nortel vice president and general manager of the Nortel-IBM Global Alliance explained that the goal of the partnership is to merge “IBM’s expertise in IT and Nortel’s leadership in communications to transform the enterprise.”
 
The Nortel-IBM System i Unified Communications solution will combine IBM’s System i business computing platform and the IBM Lotus Sametime unified communications and collaboration platform with Nortel’s VoIP and multimedia solutions. The resulting Unified Communications solution will run on a single system.
 
Lunch
During lunch, I had the pleasure of sharing a table with Lincoln Kirk, of Fred Weber, one of St. Louis, MO’s largest construction companies and materials suppliers.
 
Fred Weber is one of Nortel’s earliest unified communications customers. Kirk told me that they were very pleased with the Nortel solution, and they were already seeing benefits from having deployed the following elements:
 
  • A dual-core network with redundant Nortel Ethernet Routing Switch 8600s, using Split Multi-Link Trunking for failsafe reliability.
  • A Nortel Communication Server 1000E, a server-based, full-featured IP PBX providing converged communications across its 25 remote sites. Each of these remote sites will have a Survivable Remote Gateway (News - Alert).
  • Nortel Secure Router 1001s and redundant Secure Router 3120s, as well as the Nortel VPN Router 1750 to provide work-at-home and mobility solutions.
  • Nortel IP Softphone 2050s.
  • Microsoft (News - Alert) Office Live Communications Server client from the Nortel/Microsoft Innovative Communications Alliance portfolio.
 
Innovative Communications Alliance (News - Alert)
After lunch, we heard from the leaders representing Nortel and Microsoft and the Innovative Communications Alliance, Nortel’s Ruchi Prasad and Microsoft’s Greg St. James.
 
Prasad, vice president and general manager of the ICA for Nortel, and St. James, International Director of Microsoft’s Real-Time Collaboration Business Group, presented a series of accomplishments of the 11-month old ICA, and shared some thoughts on the progress of the alliance to date.
 
Among the highlights, Prasad mentioned that there were already over 100 customers closed and hundreds more in the pipeline. Some of the names she referenced included the aforementioned Fred Weber, BT, Wannon Water, Shell, Indiana University, Jyske Bank and Austock.
 
Prasad and St. James also noted that there were over 130 demo centers deployed globally where companies considering deploying the joint solution could come to test their systems and demo the solution in a real-life setting.
 
It appears that the first year of the Innovative Communications Alliance has yielded some good results, and even more promise for the coming year.
 
The two presenters left us with reference to the following series of unique values that ICA brings to the enterprise market:
 
  • Single client for mobility, IM, telephony, conferencing, contact center, etc…
  • Consistent business-grade telephony within Microsoft Office
  • Extending network reliability across a UC framework
  • Software centric integration
  • Single presence engine in the UC network
  • Advanced services to ease migration
  • Evolutionary path to UC
  • End to end portfolio of UC
  • Open standards-based integration and a large developer ecosystem.
 
With that, Wes Durow returned to wrap things up.
 
Wes underscored some themes that were touched on throughout the day. He left the press and analysts with four “key points to remember.”
 
  • Nortel is committed and continues to invest in the enterprise.
  • Nortel’s senior leadership (Zafirovsky, Slattery, et al) continues to build a good work environment, based on solid business discipline.
  • Nortel understands the value of creating an ecosystem of partners, recognizing that it’s difficult to “go it alone,” in today’s business environment.
  • Lastly, and most importantly, Nortel is once again winning customers — big ones.
 
Greg Galitzine is editorial director for TMC, with editorial responsibilities across the IP Communications group of products, which includes Internet Telephony (News - Alert) magazine, Unified Communications magazine, IMS magazine, Customer Interaction Solutions magazine, and TMCnet, the company’s Web site which currently enjoys over 2 million unique visitors per month.





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