Nortel (News - Alert) is focusing its efforts on helping to improve productivity and reduce the need for business travel with a new carrier-enabled unified communications solution with IBM (News - Alert).


Specifically designed for IBM Lotus Notes and IBM Lotus Sametime, the solution is expected to enable carriers to provide unified communications and collaboration services like real-time presence and multimedia conferencing integrated with IBM Lotus applications. Such integration will help to reduce travel costs and improve employee productivity for their business customers.

 

This announcement is an expansion on Nortel and IBM’s relationship in enterprise unified communications by adding a carrier-enabled solution to Nortel’s portfolio. The solution allows carriers to provide business customers with a converged communications and desktop applications service based on a new, fully integrated desktop client model.

With this solution, carriers will be able to increase revenue opportunities by offering new services using existing network investments. Unified communications will allow businesses of all sizes to extend their existing IBM Lotus solutions to include rich multimedia features, without the need to purchase, install and manage additional voice network infrastructure.

Businesses will have the ability to limit the need to travel as business meetings can be conducted using advanced multimedia conferencing. Unified communications also helps to improve employee productivity and speed response time with presence, unified messaging and click-to-collaborate that launches a video or voice conference with one simple click of the mouse.

"Data from Insignia Research has shown that productivity is improved by 60 minutes each day through unified communications," said John McCready, general manager, Carrier Multimedia Networks, Nortel, in a Monday statement.

"At Nortel, we are focused on creating a versatile unified communications portfolio of productivity enhancing solutions that any business can use to streamline processes in today's increasingly mobile work environment. The new solution allows carriers to leverage the Nortel-IBM relationship to access IBM's existing customer base and sell rich media capabilities to the millions of Lotus users globally."

"Together, IBM and Nortel are helping organizations focus on business, not just managing technology," said Bruce Morse, vice president of unified communications and collaboration, IBM Lotus, in Monday’s statement.

"This type of carrier-enabled solution is appealing to our customers since it allows them to benefit from their collaboration software while taking advantage of carrier-grade hosted communication services."

Nortel and IBM will work together to provide advisory and integration services as well as network management support in an effort to help accelerate the deployment of a unified communications experience for their customers.

Unified communications within the enterprise has been proven to improve productivity, efficiency, and communications and reduce costs, among other things. These benefits alone deliver enough value to the organization to make it worth looking into solutions that support such technology.

This latest collaboration and extension of the partnership between IBM and Nortel will deliver enhanced solutions to the customer base that will help to facilitate better communications so that the company can focus on driving market position and revenues instead of their internal infrastructure.

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