* Nortel’s unified communications business bundle
Nortel announced at the company’s annual enterprise customer conference that is introducing a program that will make unified communications easier for Nortel’s business customers to buy and deploy. The program, called UC 1-2-3, offers “ready-to-use” converged VoIP and data applications and it is designed to streamline the selection, purchasing, and deployment of unified communications products with “pre-engineered, pre-configured packages and enhanced sales tools that simplify the quoting and ordering process,” according to the company’s statement.
The unified communications business bundles can be packaged to include a full suite of third-party and Nortel’s own unified communications applications, or they can be deployed in phased stages to help with budgets and network requirements.
In a prepared statement, Steve Slattery, president of enterprise solutions at Nortel said, “The UC 1-2-3 program helps customers accelerate the transformation of their enterprise as they integrate the proliferation of devices and applications across the network, turning the communications chaos … into a real business advantage.”
Two of Nortel’s customers seem to agree that unified communications can make life easier for their business and customers. According to Thom Rivera, manager of the Technology Services Section at the Colorado Department of Transportation: “Nortel’s UC-enabled VoIP solution allowed us to reduce the time it takes to update our message signs over roadways from one hour to 11 minutes improving safety by providing ‘real-time’ updates for amber alerts, road closures, construction alerts and emergency situations.”
In another example, excelleRx, a wholly owned subsidiary of Omnicare, noted that bringing together the Nortel CS1000 and Contact Center products enable the company to “streamline our business by implementing interactive voice response and speech recognition software that significantly streamline our call management to improve operating costs and worker efficiency,” according to Steve Lemak, vice president for IT at excelleRx.
Our analysis: Pre-packaged bundles are a good thing — especially for a business that may be challenged with resources to deploy sophisticated VoIP and unified communication systems, although we still encourage all who plan use such technologies to make careful business and network assessments as part of a pre-deployment process. And we think moving forward with packaging that is flexible enough to accommodate multiple industries yet integrated enough to make adaptation easier is a good idea.
