Nortel, IBM to collaborate on enterprise IP

Nortel Networks and IBM Global Networks are expanding their existing relationship to include Nortel’s open-standards-based integrated voice-over-IP [VoIP] products.

The products enable applications such as desktop video conferencing, desktop message management for phones, faxes and e-mail, and plug-and-play software that allows phones to bve used as laptop computers.

“Previous to this arrangement we were using our own platforms for our applications. We would buy commercial servers from other suppliers and then do a lot of platform work and sell them to end users,” said Eric Ross, president of Nortel Networks Enterprise Solutions. ”With this, we’re using IBM as our platform provider.”

The relationship gives Nortel more time to focus on end-user applications, he continued. Because IBM is “among the world’s leading integrators,” Nortel gets visibility in additional market space outside what it would normally see.

“IBM has thousands and thousands and thousands of customers that they’re serving today in the mainframe arena. They’ve also begun to serve them in the telephony arena with these products, so I’m simply going to have access to a lot more users than I would have had without them,” Ross said.

IBM, in turn, gets access to Nortel’s user base and its migratory network systems that allow enterprises to move gradually into the IP space.

Nortel’s technology, Ross said, will “IP-ize your PBX” so that “you’re not pure IP because you still have your own network, but you have IP capabilities that you wouldn’t have in a TDM network. You keep the reliability and all the advancement you have in place.”