Nortel Debuts New Unified Communications Solution

Nortel reportedly announced the debut of global sales for its voice services and Unified Communications (News - Alert) (UC) solution, the Communication Server (CS) 1000 Release 6.0, that simplifies installation and user interaction, is fail-safe rugged and has advanced security levels. It is also designed mainly based on customer feed-back.

Officials at the company said when compared with earlier releases and even competitive products, the CS 1000 R6.0 provides much better simplicity, resiliency, security, and openness, and is cost effective. Official sources claim that impartial, third party comparisons with equivalent third party products discovered that the solution is up to 40 percent more energy efficient.

“During the course of a June 2009 evaluation involving the Nortel (News - Alert) CS 1000E and Cisco 7835, Tolly found through hands-on testing that the Nortel components were more energy efficient than the Cisco components," said Kevin Tolly, founder of The Tolly Group (News - Alert), a Florida based independent testing and strategic consulting organization.

"The reduction of energy usage by IT equipment reduces operating costs, reduces both power and cooling needs for the equipment and related capital expenditures, and reduces the carbon footprint of the IT operation" said Jim Sinopoli, president of Smart-Buildings, an energy-efficient building strategy advisor. "Based on the audited results, every component of the Nortel configuration is more energy efficient than the comparable Cisco (News - Alert) equipment."

In March this year, Nortel had reportedly introduced, after successful pilot runs at a few select customer locations, the CS 1000 R6.0, which offers the open source flexibility of Linux that gives customers the freedom to select any brand and combination of hardware devices such as IBM x3350 and Dell (News - Alert) R300 and significantly lowers up-front and maintenance costs. It has a built in high-density services gateway, MG 1010, that collates and centrally coordinates communications services and solutions to provide leaner and more agile networks.

CS 1000 R6.0’s improved SIP features allow the addition of any number of most third party low cost or free SIP phones as well as Nortel’s own IP Softphone 3456. It can record SIP conversations and facilitates anytime direct dialling and call interrupt. Its Mobility MC 3100 can now integrate Smartphones and other mobile communications and computing devices into the business network.

It is integrated with Nortel Contact Center 7.0 that reviews quality metrics and provides network administrators with live fault detection irrespective of location. The Nortel Multimedia Conferencing 6.0 software, now a part of CS 1000 R6.0, enables announcements, voicemail detection, and improved conferencing.

Official sources claim that the new solution offers more than 750 globally rugged telephony features including unified messaging, customer contact center, interactive voice response, wireless VoIP and SIP, IP telephony, at very competitive costs.

"Like most education institutions, we have to work with increasingly tight budgets, so we need a communication solution that maximizes our investment and can grow with us," said Butch McCraw, Head Telecom Administrator, Bellevue Public Schools. "Reliability is just as important. Given our daily charge, network redundancy and survivability are critical. With release 6.0 of CS 1000, we are able to protect our network investment by centralizing all of our schools onto a single CS 1000 system, giving us great value while making our communications even more reliable and secure."

Nortel says that Gartner, a marketing research company, has positioned Nortel in the Leader's Quadrant of the August 2008 Corporate Telephony Magic Quadrant and the September 2008 Unified Communications Magic Quadrant.