Nortel Considered a Leader

Nortel (NT) has been working away on becoming known as a unified communications supplier for a long, long time. I can remember seeing demos several years at the SkyDome in Toronto when CEO Bill Owens was talking to the media.

So, it’s not surprising that Nortel is stoked about Gartner putting Nortel’s UC solutions in the “Leader’s” quadrant.

The report is available here but if you want a short cut to see what Gartner thinks about Nortel, here you go:

Strengths

• Nortel has developed a comprehensive UC approach built around its own products and around strong partner relations. Nortel-specific solutions are built around Communication Server 1000, the company’s messaging products, the MCS 5100 and the Agile Communication Environment (ACE) initiative. Partner solutions are built through strong integrations with Microsoft’s OCS, IBM’s Sametime and open-source solutions (including via the Pingtel SIPfoundry product), as well as Software Communication System 500, a solution for integrating branch offices and for SMB.
• Nortel has multiple initiatives to provide integration with third-party solutions: the Innovative Communications Alliance with Microsoft, the service-oriented architecture-based ACE initiative, which supports multivendor UC interoperability, and a strategic partnership with IBM. These are coupled with a UC sales and training program.
• Nortel clients should include Nortel in their UC evaluations. However, Nortel’s solutions also fit into broader UC environments, and companies needing telephony or conferencing that integrates with Microsoft OCS or IBM Sametime should evaluate how Nortel fits into their plans. Companies interested in open source should consider some recent Nortel releases.

Cautions

• The competitive advantage Nortel has with the Microsoft ICA agreement will diminish. One challenge is that the differentiation it offers will decrease as other vendors advance their OCS integrations. A second challenge is that there can be confusion about the responsibility split between the two companies. Furthermore, the combined solution may be difficult to separate at a later point, should this become necessary. A final challenge is that the ICA approach may be perceived as threatening to some channels.
• Nortel is shifting its communication business model to include partnerships that are based on a software-pricing approach rather than on a hardware-pricing approach and to some open-source software and services. Although these are good and necessary changes to deal with the new communication environment, the challenge for clients and channels is to manage the potential disruptions that could result from these changes.

For those looking for a good definition of UC, Gartner says it consists of six areas:

• Voice and telephony: This area includes fixed, mobile and soft telephony, as well as the evolution of PBXs and IP-PBXs. This also includes live communications, such as video telephony.
• Conferencing: This area includes separate voice, video and Web conferencing capabilities, as well as converged unified conferencing capabilities.
•  Messaging: This area includes e-mail, which has become an indispensable business tool, voice mail and UM in various forms.
• Presence and IM: These play an increasingly central role in the next generation of communications. Presence services, in particular, are expanding to enable aggregation and publication of presence and location information from and to multiple sources. This enhanced functionality sometimes is called “rich presence.”
• Clients: Unified clients enable access to multiple communication functions from a consistent interface. These may have different forms, including thick desktop clients, thin browser clients and mobile PDA clients, as well as specialized clients embedded within business applications.
• Communication applications: This broad group of applications has directly integrated communication functions. Key application areas include consolidated administration tools, collaboration applications, contact center applications and notification applications. Eventually, other applications will be communication-enabled. When business applications are integrated with communication applications, Gartner calls these CEBP.

Comments

[Chas2002:]

If you're like me then you've seen Dubai on the Discovery channel and you may agree that Dubai has a vision.

On the TV and even with all the scripted "real drama" - Dubai strikes me as a country that wants to do things right the first time and isn't focused on "immediate gratification" but has its focus on the future and long lasting, proven engineering solutions.

So I wasn't at all surprised to read this today:

Dubai Municipality Powers e-Government with Nortel : https://etrade.wallst.com/v1/s...=|US;NT|CA;NT

2008 Oct 21 08:15 PM