Nortel Buzzboard

Anytime you invite dozens of the region’s most important media and analysts to come and talk to your senior execs, it’s probably a good idea to have a lot of news to talk about.

That’s exactly what Nortel is doing this week with a panoply of press releases related to the APAC region — all in support of this week’s Nortel Asia Summit in Sydney, Australia.

I’ve already talked about two of the releases, the 40gig win with Southern Cross Cables and the appointment of new leaders for the APAC region, but most of the week’s news has been focused on new unified communications deployments. While some of last year’s media hype about UC has quieted a bit, the real customer deployments and success stories are starting to appear, which much of this week’s news highlights:

• New customer’s from Nortel’s Innovative Communications Alliance with Microsoft are always worth highlighting, and the latest is Bosowa Corporation in Indonesia. Their new ICA solution is enabling more than 5000 employees to collaborate with their increasingly mobile colleagues at dozens of sites across the Indonesian archipelago.
• Bosowa isn’t alone in its preference for the Nortel/Microsoft ICA alliance. Computerworld Hong Kong’s 40,000 readers recently voted Nortel/Microsoft ICA as the leading solution in the UC category.
• Unified communications is again the focus in a new win with the Ministry of Water Resources (MWR) of the People’s Republic of China. The MWR is linking 31branch offices spanning 31 provinces and seven major river systems with a UC solution based on the Nortel CS 1000 IP-PBX and the MCS 5100.
• Australian insurance company MDA National is upgrading their dated phone system with — what else — a Nortel unified communications solution. But the main application here is a new state-of-the-art IP-based virtual contact center that allows customer inquiries from any Australian city to be easily directed to the most appropriate staff member regardless of their physical location. The network also provides click-to-call audio and videoconferencing among staff in different offices, and mobile unified messaging for easy remote retrieval of e-mail and voicemail. It’s worth reading the full release on this win to get all the details.
• Hollywood Private Hospital in Australia is focused on network investment protection with the upgrade of their voice network. Their deployment of a new healthcare voice communications solution from Nortel is allowing them to retain existing phones while adding modern call functionality and providing an easy upgrade to UC.