Unified Communications Magazine July 2007                                                                                                                Volume 1 / Number 1

Net Payne has been with Nortel Networks for two-and-a-half years. Previously, he worked with Sprint in Kansas City as Director of Business Marketing at Sprint PCS, which was later folded back into Sprint proper.

Richard “Zippy” Grigonis recently spoke with Payne about Nortel’s new UC campaign.

RG: Tell me about UC 1-2-3.

NP: A year ago we launched a program called IPT 1-2-3, primarily designed to upgrade our installed base of customers from TDM to IP. We offered a series of pre-engineered, preconfigured packages, made enhancements to our sales tools and created a robust commercial offer wrapped in various marketing elements. This was dramatically successful: our growth in the enterprise during the second half of 2006 was 34% and in 1Q 2007 has been 31%.

But a year ago we didn’t have a relationship with Microsoft as we do now with our Innovative Communications Alliance, nor did we have our robust alliance with IBM, focused on SameTime and Notes integration. Reflecting that change, we’ve moved to our UC 1-2-3 program, the next stage in our evolution of integrated campaigns for Nortel, to really take advantage of Nortel’s unique market position and to focus on providing unified communications products to our customers.

We’re leveraging the model we put in place with IPT 1-2-3, because we don’t want to mess with a proven entity. We’ve taken the concept of pre-engineered and pre-configured packages that include voice and data applications and services, have continued those, and now we’ve updated them. Our UC-enabled solution upgrades are founded on the new Release 5 of our CS 1000 communications server phone system. To that we add line upgrades and IP phones. Importantly, we add in various UC elements, which depend on whether you’re a Microsoft or IBM desktop-oriented organization. We’ve developed the ability to package-in for no cost our Converged Office Starter Kit which we developed with Microsoft. We provide 25 user licenses so that every package we sell is UC-enabled and our customers merely have to turn it on with Microsoft LCS to enjoy a true UC experience.

Options within these packages include our CallPilot 5.0, our Contact Center and our MCS 5100, our multimedia portfolio’s cornerstone for quite some time.

Our ordering tools have also been improved significantly. We’ve put rich commercial offers on the table which help drive our channel partners’ increase in sales by avoiding a long, customized pricing scenario. Instead, we’re giving them something they can quote and order and articulate very quickly and easily.

RG: What are the surrounding marketing elements?

NP: Training for our channel partners and our Direct Touch organization, customer-facing events and road shows across North America, and sales tools demand generation. There’s also a tactical group we call the UC 1-2-3 War Room, who help with deal-specific opportunities for our channel partners against our competitors and ensure that we tie all the different campaign elements together.

The program and its incentives also encourage partners’ sales reps to attach data and applications to sales. We have more of an opportunity to attach more data when we’re selling these packages than we did in the past. We focus on PoE [Power-over-Ethernet], our Nortel Secure Router, and our Wireless LAN portfolio. We round that out with services aligned with our overall strategy of helping our channel partners in areas where they don’t necessarily have competency in offering Nortel services to enable UC for our customers, or in tech support, installation and maintenance.

Ultimately, the UC 1-2-3 program helps customers tame and even leverage the hyperconnectivity chaos resulting from the proliferation of devices and applications across the network. For more information, visit www.nortel.com/uc123.