Nortel's New Enterprise Strategy Eyes Convergence

Nortel Networks has announced a new enterprise strategy, dubbed One Network: A World of Choice, which the company says will offer end-to-end voice, data, multimedia and converged Internet Protocol solutions to businesses of all sizes.

According to Oscar Rodriguez, president of enterprise networks at Nortel Networks, the concept behind One Network: A World of Choice follows the notion that a single converged network can cut costs, time, and energy, as call center operators can discover and meet customer needs more readily via any communications platform.

"Many networks today are a combination of components targeted at serving narrow sets of users, applications, and services without consideration of the benefits of a converged communications architecture," Rodriguez says. "Our strategy challenges the current paradigm of network design by focusing on our enterprise customers and meeting their requirements to serve their customers, while increasing the productivity of their workforce and minimizing capital and operational expenses."
Says Mark Brubaker, senior vice president at national mortgage broker Countrywide: "In our business it is essential to share information globally, and whether it's in the form of data or voice communications, we need to be certain that our network serves our customers and employees. Since the nature of the financial services business is such that our network is required to operate in the worst of conditions, including disaster situations and other events that cause stress to the communications infrastructure, we need constant uptime, with redundancy, resilience, and graceful degradation features.
"More importantly, we need a single network that can accommodate users by any means, including data, fax, email, and voice communications. Nortel Networks offers a strategy to position us to deliver responsiveness to our customers--even under the most difficult circumstances--while driving to keep our operational expenses low," Brubaker says.
Supporting this strategy Nortel Networks also announced today three new platforms that are designed to enable these converged networks: Nortel Networks Succession Communication Server for Enterprise (CSE) 1000 Release 2.0; Nortel Networks CallPilot Release 2.0; and Nortel Networks BayStack 460-24T-PWR Power Over Ethernet Switch. All are expected to be available by January 2003.