Nortel Unveils Cost-Saving UC Solutions for SMBs, Including VoIP

Eyeing a fertile market at a time when U.S. small business owners are eagerly watching presidential candidates discuss how their tax plans and the federal bailout will affect their livelihoods, an international communications company headquartered in Toronto today unveiled a cost-savings solution for organizations with up to 300 workers.

 

Officials at Nortel (News - Alert) describe their Business Communications Manager 450, or “BCM450,” as a unified communications solution that accelerates the transition from legacy digital equipment and can save firms up to 70 percent of their original IT investment by reusing the hardware they already have.

 

Wes Durow, Nortel’s vice president of enterprise global marketing and strategy, told TMCnet during an interview that the business paradigm has changed, and that legacy digital equipment doesn’t provide the features or cost-savings that SMBs to remain competitive.

 

“Unified communications offers up a feature set that was once only available to Enterprise,” Durow said. “The BCM450 speeds the move to unified communication for medium-sized businesses with up to 300 users, offering them access to key feature segments of unified communications and the ability to expand this feature set with third-party development.”

 

For Durow, the economic crisis facing the United States, and now the world, presents a time for SMBs to differentiate themselves by becoming efficient, and so, more competitive.

 

“The BCM450 accelerates the move to unified communications and in doing so brings people together faster to improve collaboration and increase the speed at which decisions are made,” Durow told TMCnet. “Driving cost-savings is also important in today’s environment and the mobility options of the BCM450 help SMBs cut travel costs and long-distance charges.”

 

The BCM450, available from Nortel through strategic vendors such as AT&T (News - Alert), includes UC features such as: unified messaging, consolidating voice, fax and e-mail messages onto a single device; message forwarding, available in one to two months, which sends voicemails and faxes to the most convenient desktop or mobile device; “Meet-Me Conferencing” that can establish teleconferences for up to 120 participants; computer telephony integration, which allows the use of third-party applications to control telephone services, such as click-to-call or automatic screen “pop” with customer information when they call; and “Intelligent Contact Center” functionality, which quickly directs clients to the right contact.

 

The BCM450 announcement dovetails with other major news from Nortel today. The company is hailing its Business Services Gateway (News - Alert) 8, or “BSG8,” and BSG12, as solutions that replace multiple equipment and software for SMBs by including: a router; advanced security including 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.

 

One Nortel client, IT consulting firm Domitek’s president, Libis Bueno, said the solutions’ all-in-one configuration lets his company focus on customers, as opposed to its network.

 

“It provides a simple, reliable and cost-effective unified-communications-ready infrastructure,” Bueno said. “The BSG’s powerful bandwidth prioritization features allow us to tailor our network to ensure that the communications applications we rely on most are given priority over those that aren’t as important to our business objectives.”

 

For Durow, Nortel is a leader in the SMB space, and the BCM450 is built from the ground upwith the SMBs in mind. It’s not just a repurposed enterprise offering, he told TMCnet.

 

“It also provides a scalable evolution from one part of the BCM portfolio to the next,” Durow told TMCnet. “And, rather than having to rip and replace to implement the BCM450, Nortel customers can save up to 70 percent of their prior investments by reusing their existing equipment.”