Nortel upgrading IP PBX, media server

New capabilities are designed to streamline deployment of advanced applications.

Nortel this week is expected to announce upgraded IP PBX and enterprise multimedia conference servers designed to simplify the deployment of advanced applications such as presence management and multimedia conferencing.

The promise of such applications is to help employees be more productive and to cut costs on external teleconference services by hosting conferencing as an internal application running across a private IP network or over the Internet, Nortel says.

The company is adding Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) to its IP PBX, the Succession Communication Server 1000, and is enabling its Media Convergence Server (MCS) 5100 multimedia server to work with legacy analog and digital phones, in addition to the IP phones it has supported for several years.

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Nortel this week is expected to announce upgraded IP PBX and enterprise multimedia conference servers designed to simplify the deployment of advanced applications such as presence management and multimedia conferencing.

The promise of such applications is to help employees be more productive and to cut costs on external teleconference services by hosting conferencing as an internal application running across a private IP network or over the Internet, Nortel says.

The company is adding Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) to its IP PBX, the Succession Communication Server 1000, and is enabling its Media Convergence Server (MCS) 5100 multimedia server to work with legacy analog and digital phones, in addition to the IP phones it has supported for several years.

Version 3.0 of the MCS 5100 and 4.0 of the Communication Server 1000 are in trials at Franklin Olin College, an engineering school in Needham, Mass. Giving students and staff a converged desktop application for communications is one driver for deploying the MCS on campus, says Joanne Kossuth, the school's CIO.

"That service will appeal to students spending a semester abroad," she says, noting that it will let them stay in touch with professors and friends online through Nortel's Converged Desktop. That client application integrates VoIP and IP video conferencing, e-mail and chat applications.

The IP PBX and media server upgrades let businesses extend the Converged Desktop application to support legacy Nortel digital and analog phone sets. An end user with a PC and an old TDM-based Meridian handset could use the phone in multimedia conferencing and click-to-dial applications that are supported on Nortel IP phone and softphone products.

"When doing one of these IP telephony implementations, one of the huge expenses is the phone sets," says Bob Hafner, director of research for Gartner. Offering ability to use multimedia applications with legacy handsets could be a compelling selling point for businesses unsure about upgrading to VoIP, he says.

"When it comes to telephony replacement, pretty much everyone has a good enough [IP PBX] product," Hafner says. "Where the differentiation occurs is when you look at the multimedia features in the products." He says MCS is ahead of offerings from Cisco and Avaya in terms of converged applications and on par with products from such vendors as Alcatel and Mitel.

Communication Server 4.0 costs $640 per user - not including phones. Pricing information was not available on Version 3.0 of the MCS 5100.

In addition to the MCS and Communication Server upgrades, Nortel is coming out with Version 22 of its Alteon OS, with the ability to balance SIP traffic loads. When deployed on Nortel's Alteon Layer 4-7 switches, the software will let businesses balance SIP-based VoIP and multimedia traffic across servers, making these services more reliable and stable, the vendor says. The software upgrade with SIP load balancing costs $12,000 and is scheduled to be available next month.