Unified Communications

Unified communications can enable you to harness the collective thoughts, creativity and energy of your dispersed workforce to accelerate time to market, speed time to solve customers’ problems, and to create competitive advantage. Without UC, it takes too long to find appropriate people to help answer questions and obtain guidance which impacts personal and organizational productivity and customer service. It also costs too much money on travel and living to have frequent face to face meetings and training sessions.

At the heart of UC is the presence engine which monitors the status, activity and location of people, devices, and applications so, for example, you can easily see who is available and best situated to help you at any point in time. Once the appropriate person has been identified, UC enables a more natural, intuitive communication using any mix of voice, video, texting, instant messaging, data and application sharing over a suitable device – desk phone, mobile phone, video appliance, Personal Computer. UC is a stepping stone to Communication Enabled Business Process applications which automated the process of communicating to the right person/people based on a business process event trigger taking the human delay out of business processes.

With Nortel's expertise and experience in delivering Unified Communications and Communication Enabled Business Processes, we can help you streamline your business processes by eliminating the delays caused by the time it takes to track down the right people and information. Ringier has deployed UC with the expectation to increase employee productivity by 20%. Eircom has deployed UC with the plan to improve productivity and remove $1.4M of costs in year one. With UC and CEBP you can accelerate decision - making while simultaneously cutting costs to deliver real business value.

Nortel's Unified Communications solutions enable you to leverage your existing investment in communications systems, networks, devices, and business processes and extend communication services into unified user interfaces and business applications.

Nortel can also provide a full range of Unified Communications Services that can accelerate and expedite all stages of a unified communications deployment.

Nortel is delivering unified communications to customers that meet their needs, in their environment while leveraging current systems and processes. Through Nortel's alliances with world-class enterprise software developers (Microsoft with our Innovative Communications Alliance, Nortel - IBM Alliance), Nortel is delivering unified communications with value propositions that offer significant benefits to customers.

• See how others are making the move to Unified Communications
• Find out what Nortel Unified Communications can do for your industry:
  • Government
  • Hospitality
  • Education
  • Healthcare

To start your journey to UC, you may decide on a Nortel UC service such as a discovery workshop to identify business drivers and technical requirements for UC in your business.

You may also want to select from a suite of UC applications from Nortel.

Agile Communication Environment is an extensible, flexible middleware environment using open web services in a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) framework to leverage existing communication systems you’ve already invested in and extend those communication services into business applications and business processes.

A number of bundled applications built using Agile Communication Environment (ACE) are available for Nortel and non-Nortel PBX systems including:

• UC Desktop for ACE - Find the right person and use the most convenient way of communicating by unifying desktop UC clients with business telephony and video systems.
• Hot Desking - Facilitates flexible working and real-estate consolidation by enabling any phone - desk or mobile, internal or external - to be used with business one number service. The application can optionally be integrated with UC desktop application.
• Sales Portal for ACE - Delivers contextual communications by adding presence, click to instant message, click to call and other applications to internal and external web pages and business applications

The Nortel ACE platform can also be used to build custom UC and CEBP applications using, for example, notification services to orchestrate a communication session (Instant Message, Short Message Service (SMS) text, phone call, conference call) as a result of business process event triggers. These business process events could be triggered as a result of a location tracked vehicle, person or asset crossing a boundary. The trigger could also be a change in a database or a threshold exceeded such as inventory depletion. For example, a debt collection specialist may be about to call a customer who has not paid their bill using an outbound dialing application. Meanwhile, the customer, realizing their omission, has gone on the website and paid the bill. Using an agile environment, the customer can automatically and immediately be removed from the outbound phone queue the moment the bill has been paid. Instead of receiving an inappropriate phone call from the debt collector, the customer might instead be sent an SMS text message or voice message thanking them for their payment and perhaps informing them of a promotional offer. ACE can help orchestrate this process.

• Unified Messaging - Enables voicemail, fax and e-mail to be available from a single location that can be accessed from anywhere, whether over the Internet or by telephone
• Multimedia Conferencing - Provides audio and video conferencing with extensive user and chairperson commands and optional UC client integration.
• Converged Office for Communication Server 1000 - Integrates Nortel business-grade telephony with Microsoft desktop collaboration and communication systems in an open-SIP, standards-based environment and provides one number service, presence status and Remote Call Control of Communication Server 1000 connected phones.
• Multimedia Communication Server 5100 - A SIP based unified communications solution which seamlessly integrates IP Telephony, multimedia conferencing, instant messaging (IM), presence and other collaboration tools for employees - anywhere, anytime, increasing user mobility, enhancing productivity, improving the effectiveness of communications and reducing communication costs.

IP Phones & Clients: Nortel IP Phones & Clients support a comprehensive suite of telephony features and applications with solutions designed to meet varying communication needs from small-to-large. Check out these products to learn more:

• IP Phone 1100 Series
• IP Phone 2000 Series
• Mobile Communication 3100
• IP Softphone 2050
• LG-Nortel IP Phone 8500 Series
• WLAN Handsets 6100 Series

Application Aware Networks: Unified Communications require a resilient, secure and intelligent network. Check out these products to learn more:

• Ethernet Routing Switch 8600
• Secure Router Portfolio
• Power Over Ethernet Switches
• VPN Router Portfolio

Security: Protect against Denial of Service attacks and other security threats with the Secure Multimedia Controller 2450.

Carrier-Hosted Solutions: Nortel's IMS-ready carrier grade softswitch supports a wide range of signaling, transport and control protocols including both MGCP and SIP for line gateways.