IBM teams with Nortel, Redback

ATLANTA—IBM announced partnerships with Nortel Networks and Redback Networks at SuperComm this week aimed at giving service providers technology geared toward enterprise customers.

IBM has been working to partner with many different network equipment providers to couple their services with IBM’s e-business technologies, said Jan Jackman, vice president of strategy for the net generation business at IBM.

“It’s been a key part of our strategy to begin working with [equipment providers] and then get into joint solutions that target particular customer sets, particular deals that can quickly help service providers add new types of services and create new revenue streams for their business,” she said.

“Through the partnerships and service providers we really believe that we can help them meet their goals of e-business rollout,” she added.

IBM’s infrastructure products and services were combined with Nortel’s optical Internet and optical Ethernet resources in an IP networking infrastructure to address challenges associated with e-business and application hosting.

Called Network Solutions for e-Business, the IBM/Nortel partnership lets service providers outsource an Internet and e-business infrastructure to an enterprise that can be scaled to offer data center applications via optical transport, delivering high-speed e-business applications in the process.

“Our goal [with Nortel] is to target service providers who are seeking enterprises as their main customer set and making sure that they feel confident that they can get the security, the reliability, [and] the availability of the applications that they need to run their business,” Jackman said.

Designed to integrate with existing network architectures, Network Solutions for e-Business features include e-mail, remote access and storage. In addition, essentials such as security, quality of service, virtual private Ethernet and dynamic caching also are provided.

Network Solutions for e-Business combines IBM's eServer systems, TotalStorage products, IBM WebSphere Application Server and Edge Server, and Tivoli Systems software with Nortel’s Optical Ethernet portfolio, including the OPTera Packet Edge System, OPTera Metro 3500 Multiservice Platform and OPTera Metro 5200. In addition, the Nortel Alteon 780 Web switch and Nortel Shasta Broadband Service Node 5000 also is used.

While Nortel focuses on the Internet data center, Redback focuses on the access layers.

IBM partnered with Redback to create a service portal called Rapid IP Services for e-Business Solutions to drive service use and revenues for the service provider. The solution lets service providers create a new IP service selection and provision the network for more bandwidth to deploy those applications.

IBM, Redback and IBM subsidiary Tivoli will jointly sell the solution.

Rapid IP Services for e-Business Solutions can be bundled and re-branded. Via the solution, subscribers can personalize IP-based services via a Web-based portal and access them via any location or personal device.

Rapid IP Services for e-Business Solutions uses revenue-generating applications from IBM, including WebSphere eCommerce solutions and e-Learning solutions. Redback networking equipment such as the Redback SMS and Redback SmartEdge multiservice optical platform supply the network infrastructure for solution. The solutions are managed with Tovoli products such as the Tivoli Web Service Manager and Tivoli Storage Manager.

Jackman said that IBM is finishing the integration testing for these two partnerships and will be fully ready to deploy within the next month or so.