Nortel finally set for VoIP charge

Nortel this week will release IP telephony gear that promises to scale the company's voice-over-IP support by a factor of 10 while finally bringing its convergence portfolio up to speed with chief rival Cisco.

The company's second version of its Succession Communication Server for Enterprise (CSE) 1000 IP PBX will support 1,000 IP phone users on a server, and up to 10,000 IP phones on a cluster of 10 servers. Also being introduced is a version of Nortel's CallPilot unified messaging system and a power-over-Ethernet LAN switch - the BayStack 460-24T-PRW.

These products are aimed at companies looking to move to IP telephony but unwilling to give up the reliability and features of a traditional PBX system, the company says.

"Scaling up the CSE 1000 is really a significant move for Nortel," says Brian Riggs, a senior analyst with Current Analysis. "They have really struggled in the past couple of years to be competitive in terms of scalability and functionality with other packet PBX companies. Nortel should be a powerhouse in enterprise IP telephony, and they aren't."

Once considered a serious threat to Cisco's enterprise network dominance, Nortel has lagged in market share and new product offerings as the company has undergone radical restructuring and a shifting of focus from carrier to business customers. When Nortel laid off more than half its workforce and saw losses reach $3.5 billion a year ago, many corporate customers became spooked.

"A year ago, I was worried about Nortel's focus on the enterprise," says Sheng Guo, CTO for the state of New York Unified Court System, which deploys a variety of Nortel switches. "Now, at least for the time being, they seem more committed."

Although Nortel is still in the red, its losses are half what they were a year ago and it expects to break even next year. The company says its enterprise business group is already profitable.

Nortel reorganized a year ago into three groups: long-haul optical, metropolitan-area and enterprise networks, and wireless. Nortel again reorganized earlier this month, creating four groups - wireless networks, wireline networks, enterprise networks and optical networks.

IP phone support for Version 2.0 of Nortel's CSE 1000 has been boosted from 650 users per server to 1,000. IP trunking capabilities also were added to the IP PBX, letting CSE 1000s be networked together and managed as one system, with a total scale of around 10,000 users. Version 1.0 of the CSE 1000 could not be networked with other CSE servers to support more users than the 650 maximum.

Version 2.0 of the CSE 1000 breaks down into three parts: the Call Server, which provides call and connection services; the Signaling Server, an H.323-based gateway for connecting to other Signaling Servers; and the Succession Media Gateway, for providing dial tone to remote sites.

Optivity Telephony Manager software is included, which can be used to make adds, moves and changes across multiple CSE 1000 Call Servers.

Remote offices with IP phones that connect to a centralized IP PBX can now deploy Nortel's Media Gateway, a device that provides locally based dial tone and telephony features in case an IP WAN link to the central CSE 1000 server fails.