The New York Times taps Nortel to build secure VoIP net

The New York Times is changing its address, with a moved planned for next spring to a new state-of-the-art facility in Times Square. Along with glass-and-steel architecture, desks without coffee stains and crumbs in the keyboards, the 3,500 or so Times employees plan to move to an all IP data, voice and video network, humming along on a single Nortel-built infrastructure.

While vacating its 43rd Street headquarters, which the paper has occupied since 1913, the company is leaving a legacy voice/data network built on Avaya Definity PBXs and phones, and Cisco switches and routers. The network at the new building will consist of Nortel gear from the desktop LAN ports to the data center and LAN core. The single-vendor net will provide greater security, easier management and more rich-media capabilities for users, Times IT technologists say.

Click to see: New York Times' new net

The Times spent the last two years evaluating Nortel’s voice/data product offerings against an Avaya/Cisco converged network package, according to Bob Kraft, vice president of enterprise services for the New York Times Co.

“Conceptually, we felt we could be successful with either an integration of Cisco and Avaya products,” or an end-to-end Nortel package, Kraft says. “It came down to other things,” when the decision was made to go with an all-Nortel network.

A week was spent in the product-demo laboratories at Avaya, Cisco and Nortel, Kraft says, resulting in an internal document “bigger than 100 pages,” evaluating the technologies against one another. During the evaluation, cost was considered a “tie-breaker” but not an ultimate deciding factor.

The list price of just the Nortel hardware going into the new Times building is about $10 million, not including the cost of Nortel Global Services, which is providing product installation, and 24-by-seven postinstallation support services. The Times would not say the exact cost of the products and services from Nortel.

Kraft says the single-vendor approach with Nortel will let the company more easily manage and troubleshoot the converged network. A tight integration of security technologies — such as policy-based networking, NAC and IPS/IDS — into the Nortel voice and data infrastructure was also a factor.