Nortel Wins Government Communications Deals across the Asia Pacific Region

Unified Communications and Virtual Collaboration Drive Public Sector Initiatives

Nortel* [OTC: NRTLQ] has recently won significant public sector deals in several countries across the Asia Pacific region that cover a range of emerging networking technologies including Unified Communications (UC), Ethernet Routing Switches, contact center deployments and virtual collaboration environments.

Governments are traditionally conservative in their technology buying patterns with intense scrutiny on technology decisions and long buying cycles. Nortel’s continued growth in the government sector is a clear indicator of the industry’s confidence in Nortel’s technology and its long term ability to meet customer needs.

Nortel has seen recent success with public sector investments in Australia and New Zealand , Greater China, India , South East Asia and Japan . Central and local government departments, healthcare institutions, educational establishments, court systems, tax offices, energy and transport network providers have all upgraded or deployed new communications environments as the region’s central services have dramatically improved the way in which they communicate both internally and with their external stakeholders such as citizens, suppliers and other government departments.

The government court systems in two of the region’s most populous cities have invested in Nortel Unified Communications and Ethernet Routing Switch solutions. There are changing demands within modern courts, as court employees are required to be available to their clients and co-workers anytime, anywhere. This has created a high demand for end-to-end UC technologies, including full 10GE backbone support to the desktop, and leading edge UC applications. In one instance, the court was able to streamline its operations by deploying a powerful and secure data network from Nortel to support a centralized judicial system database.

In education, trials and deployments of Nortel’s virtual world application known as web.alive are providing an immersive learning experience for students in both primary school and university environments. Web.alive is a virtual world software application that provides a network secured virtual world platform for collaboration, assisted virtual learning and training applications. The solution allows education providers to adapt teaching methods to the modern communications-rich world, enhancing student attention, engagement and retention. This v irtual world collaboration environment is helping learning centers deal with one of the major drawbacks of other communication technologies: the ability to give users a ’real-life’ experience that is more interactive and intuitive. It is another example of how Nortel’s technology is supporting the learning needs of students across the region – with other major educational deployments announced in recent times in Australia, India, Japan and South East Asia. And learning centers across the region are now looking to technology solutions as a way of safeguarding educational continuity in the face of the continued threat of a more severe swine flu pandemic.

With Nortel’s unified communications solution in place, employees at Porirua City Council in New Zealand are now more accessible to their colleagues, suppliers and customers whether they are in the office or performing their duties off-site – meaning enhanced productivity and increased efficiency. The solution also allows Porirua City Council to address the unique needs of its mobile workforce, which forms over 30% of the organization and which has previously had to manage a variety of systems to stay in touch. The new multimedia contact center solution, which enables UC capabilities such as integrated voice, email, fax and instant messaging, will drive up customer service quality on offerings such as holiday programs and inspection bookings, with a focus on increased speed and an enhanced user experience.

In India , Nortel has supported the huge investment in new airport infrastructure across the country with significant voice and data solutions, together with ongoing managed service deals, in a number of the country’s new international airports, including those in Mumbai, Bangalore , Delhi and Hyderabad .

And in the healthcare sector, Nortel’s solutions are helping speed patient discharge procedures, improve staff efficiency, enable better communications for a mobile workforce, and improve the quality of patient care. Agile clinical communications use many of the voice and data networks components that already exist in a hospital to connect the disparate systems, people and processes in order to maximize return on investment in clinical systems and infrastructure. Healthcare providers and teaching hospitals from Singapore to Japan are relying on Nortel’s solutions to support their critical communications needs.

EXAMPLES OF HOW NORTEL’S SOLUTIONS ARE SUPPORTING PUBIC SECTOR INITIATIVES

* New Zealand Public Service Association Gets Unified With Nortel and Gen-i - The New Zealand Public Service Association (PSA), New Zealand ’s largest union with more than 57,000 registered members, expects to save up to 18 percent annually on call fees by migrating to a unified communications network from Nortel, Microsoft and implementation partner Gen-i. The solution gives PSA new functionality - such as unified messaging and presence - that allows operators to instantly ’see’ the status of their colleagues and know exactly how to reach them, be it by phone or e-mail. The system also creates a single collection point for voicemails for all staff so no message goes unanswered.
* Taiwan Post Secures Business Continuity with Nortel Metro Ethernet Soluion - Taiwan Post, the largest postal, banking and insurance services provider in Taiwan , ensures customers will continue to be served and catastrophic failure to business operations averted in the event of disaster through a Nortel Metro Ethernet solution. Taiwan Post is ensuring business continuity with Metro Ethernet technology by enabling real-time information backup, access and recovery.
* Nortel Metro Ethernet Solution Helps Shanghai Metro Line 1 Trains Run on Time - With the Nortel Metro Ethernet solution in place, CBDTS will transmit information relating to wireless access systems, electronic monitoring, digital television and broadcasting, including comprehensive network monitoring and alerting tools. All operational and management information - voice, data and video - will be securely and accurately transmitted and monitored, ensuring seamless communications among train staff and access to the PIS (Passenger Information System) at all times.
* Nortel Provides Network Infrastructure for Commonwealth Youth Games 2008 - The Commonwealth Youth Games 2008, held in Pune , India from October 12 to 18, ran on a next-generation data network infrastructure set up by Nortel. The always-on, highly available network supporting 1,000 users, ran multimedia applications including real-time schedule updating, statistical analysis, resource coordination and media coverage helping ensure the Commonwealth Youth Games 2008 ran smoothly.
* Japan ’s Kyushu University Hospital has improved patient care by fostering staff collaboration over a new medical information network based on Nortel’s clinical-grade Healthcare Solutions portfolio. And in Taiwan , the wireless Taiwan Mobile Healthcare Services give Taipei-based doctors virtual access to patient medical records, high-quality diagnostic images and video, and other innovative connectivity services.
* The University of the East (UE) in the Philippines has selected Nortel to help upgrade its information technology infrastructure and to boost the performance of all its computerized and web applications systems. With this system, UE students, faculty and personnel can access UE’s centralized database enabling quicker, easier, and more efficient academic, financial and administrative transactions.
* Australia ’s renowned RMIT University has upgraded its Nortel data network to support new, high-bandwidth services such as media streaming, YouTube feeds and videoconferencing for staff and students across 220 campus locations. The data network allows the University to drive high-bandwidth media streaming applications across its 12,500 PCs without affecting the performance of business-critical communications and media-intense research applications.
* The Victorian Education and Research Network (VERNet) has deployed a Nortel Metro Ethernet Solution to significantly boost network capacity to provide member institutions with ’always on’ high-speed broadband connectivity. This allows more than 100 research and education institutions in the state of Victoria to introduce services such as real-time, high-definition video broadcasts, offsite disaster recovery and connections to radio telescopes.
* National University of Malaysia Unleashes Student Learning With Nortel - Formed to deliver an innovative education with roots in traditional knowledge and culture, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia(UKM) is expanding its online usage by introducing a range of online applications including e-learning, network-intensive research applications, VoIP, IPTV and more. These applications empower students and faculty to teach and learn in collaborative new ways, and their successful deployment provides an important competitive differentiator for universities.

QUOTE

François Lançon, leader, enterprise, Nortel Asia/EMEA

“Government agencies and departments face their very own set of business, policy and network technology challenges. Nortel is working with governments and public sector institutions across the Asia Pacific region to improve communications and collaboration, helping governments in their quest to better serve citizens, businesses and their community, and protecting government information, critical infrastructure and key assets. ”

Peter van der Burg, Manager, Information Systems, Porirua City Council

“The key driver in engaging Nortel through its partner Gen-i was that the time had come to update our existing Nortel PABX – which no longer had the capacity to serve the growing communication needs of some of our new sites. Nortel helped us analyze our current and future communications needs and provided us with a clear development roadmap. We now have a platform in place that will provide us with a fully unified communications solution to service the ever changing needs of the community.”

“As a first step, the new technology is already helping to provide a better workplace environment that we think will be instrumental in both retaining and attracting new staff. Providing a way of measuring and improving our customer service performance will allow us to develop a more proactive approach, bringing us closer to our customers and their needs. Future services such as federated instant messaging and the ability to link communications into our other business processes will enable us to meet and exceed the expectations of all those who interface with the Council.”

About Nortel

Nortel delivers communications capabilities that make the promise of Business Made Simple a reality for our customers. Our next-generation technologies, for both service provider and enterprise networks, support multimedia and business-critical applications. Nortel’s technologies are designed to help eliminate today’s barriers to efficiency, speed and performance by simplifying networks and connecting people to the information they need, when they need it. For more information, visit Nortel on the Web at www.nortel.com . For the latest Nortel news, visit www.nortel.com/news .

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