Nortel Unveils Data Strategy For The Transformed Enterprise

INTEROP, LAS VEGAS – Nortel* [NYSE/TSX: NT] this week is unveiling its enterprise data strategy and a host of new product offerings targeted at businesses around the world to address the huge bandwidth needs and complex networking requirements of today’s hyperconnected business environment.

“There is a transformation taking place in today’s enterprise as businesses increasingly rely on instantaneous communications to keep a competitive edge. This need for total connectedness is creating an explosion in real-time voice, video and data, that are placing a staggering load on enterprise networks,” said Mike Zafirovski, Nortel president and CEO. “Nortel calls this trend Hyperconnectivity, and with it comes complexity and costs that will fundamentally change how businesses will deploy new applications and the networks that support them.”

Zafirovski will address an Interop keynote audience on Wednesday to discuss the challenges that today’s businesses face as Hyperconnectivity and unified communications (UC) blur the lines between new and existing methods of business communications.

“Nortel will help transform the modern enterprise. We are investing and putting into place the piece parts to really grow our enterprise business,” said Zafirovski. “It’s not about piling on new network layers, it’s about conserving legacy investments and powering new applications with simple solutions that bring new levels of consolidation, virtualization and more.”

Nortel’s data strategy – called Business Optimized Networking – is focused on creating a network that seamlessly sustains and enhances the communications tools and applications that are the foundation of today’s businesses.

“At any one time, we can have thousands of people on our network – customers, workers, media – creating tremendous demand for more bandwidth, reliability, and security from our network. Nortel helped simplify, mobilize and optimize our new facility,” said David Stewart, regional manager of technology for SMG Management, the company that owns and operates the Louisiana Superdome. “We believe Nortel’s Business Optimized Networking will help us and other enterprises manage these demands going forward and ultimately help simplify an otherwise complicated series of network challenges.”

Nortel has created five building blocks to optimize the transformed enterprise, supporting unified communications and other business applications, while simplifying and consolidating the network to improve manageability and reduce costs. The five building blocks are:

Converge your core. As enterprise networks converge they are being asked to handle more diverse network traffic with higher reliability and intelligence. Recent additions to our Ethernet Routing Switch portfolio enable enterprise LANs to intelligently prioritize real-time business communications like voice, video, and multimedia services. The portfolio provides cost-per-gigabit of throughput that is up to five times less than the leading competitor.

Extend your enterprise. Extending the same functionality and quality of service to branch locations that is available at the company’s headquarters has long been an enterprise challenge. Nortel is today unveiling the new Secure Router (SR) 4134 as the latest edition to its secure router portfolio to simplify the challenge of extending “enterprise-quality” communications tools and applications, like UC, to the branch office.

Mobilize your employees. Today’s mobile worker makes it crucial for enterprises to sustain employee productivity while on the go. Enhancements to Nortel’s WLAN portfolio provide a mobile access solution optimized to support the demands of VoIP and real-time multimedia services.

Accelerate your applications. As workers become increasingly mobile and remote, enterprises must provide users with continuous access to business critical applications. The Nortel Application Accelerator introduced today enables businesses to improve the performance of their centralized web-based applications.

Secure and manage your infrastructure. A truly business optimized network must be secure and easy to manage from end to end. Nortel’s depth of experience and robust services portfolio in this area contributed to recent wins with Louisiana Superdome, and the Vancouver 2010 Winter Games.

To execute upon its Business Optimized Networking strategy, Nortel will leverage the North American marketing campaign announced in March. This program includes partner tools, focused demand generation activities, pre-engineered data packages, and optional services that make it easier and more cost-effective for authorized channel partners to deploy a data network that supports customers’ application and UC business needs and priorities.

Available now for quoting, these solution packages and services include options that, when coupled with our IP communications portfolio, enhance the value delivered to the customer. They enable cost effective full deployment of Power over Ethernet, VoIP-Optimized Secure Routing for superior WAN access, and WLAN for simple, secure, seamless mobility as well as optional maintenance, installation and technical support services. Nortel’s Business Optimized Networking strategy also includes promotion and incentive programs available today through authorized Nortel channel partners for enterprises who are customizing their network.

“With Nortel’s business optimized networking, I have a systematic strategy for ensuring that my customer’s data infrastructure is meeting current requirements and positioning them to overcome tomorrow’s unforeseen bandwidth demands,” said Lee Orr, president, Spectrum Solutions.