Wednesday, October 8, 2008

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Nortel's UC Solutions For Thrifty Businesses

Nortel today unveiled a pair of unified communications (UC) offerings, including a bargain-priced bundle and a new IP migration kit for saving money by re-using existing hardware.

Citing the current economic condition and the need for small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to “do more with less and streamline their operations,” Nortel says the first of the offerings is a pair of multi-service router and gateway bundles aimed at the SMB market: the Business Services Gateway (BSG) 8 and the BSG12. The BSG8 is suitable for companies with fewer than 200 employees, while the BSG12 is aimed at the largest SMBs. Nortel is touting them as a bundle that eliminates the need for a business to buy multiple pieces of equipment and software. The big lure is a price tag Nortel says is 45-percent less than if the various pieces of hardware and software were bought separately.

The single solutions include: a router; advanced security with a firewall, VPN and intrusion detection; wired and wireless switching; a resilient SIP gateway with an integrated Analog Telephony Adapter; and application-aware Quality of Services (QoS). In addition to serving as a company’s gateway, Nortel adds that, in a managed-service environment, the systems can serve as a client-side data infrastructure platform for carriers that deliver hosted VoIP services to SMBs with Nortel's IP Powered Business Solutions.

"SMBs want solutions that save them time, money and are easy to use," says Joel Hackney, president/Enterprise Solutions at Nortel. "The easy to deploy BSG provides a network foundation that complements the UC features of the BCM450, allowing businesses to realize time and cost-savings benefits with an end-to-end solution.”

The BCM450 is the other new offering from Nortel unveiled today, a system aimed at medium-sized businesses with as many as 300 employees that can reuse existing TDM hardware as a business transitions to IP and thus, Nortel says, save an enterprise as much as 70 percent of what it might otherwise spend. It becomes the high end of Nortel’s Hybrid-IP Business Communications Manager line, which supports unified messaging, message forwarding, “meet-me” conferencing, computer telephony integration (CTI) and “intelligent contact center” functionality plus now-standard telephony features including voice messaging, IP networking, Internet access, mobility solutions and IP telephony.