Nortel Buzzboard

This week Nortel announced several new customer wins including significant services-led deals. If you follow this blog, you’ve heard me highlight multiple times the corporate focus (led by Mike Z) on turning Nortel into a software and services leader.

With this week’s customer wins, all of which relied heavily on consulting and other support services, I thought it was a great opportunity to get some insight directly from Jerry Boezel, who heads up channel strategy and marketing under Nortel Global Services President Dietmar Wendt. Below is Jerry’s guest post, as well as a Nortel video on services-powered businesses:

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Jerry Boezel, Vice President,Global Services Channel Strategy and Marketing for NortelAs a marketer, much of my time is spent talking with frontline sales teams to learn what works and what we need to focus on. It is very energizing to talk about things to come. I was in a meeting in Maidenhead, UK some time ago with several sales leaders from Europe to discuss customer opportunities for Nortel’s exciting new Secure Portable Office (SPO) solution - which was not announced at the time. It’s essentially your secure “office on a stick” that every road warrior will love. It allows secure access to corporate information and applications through a specially formatted USB key, and it is applicable to many industries.

One of the managers on my team was field-testing SPO. He said “SPO enhances teleworking. No need to carry the company laptop around when you bike to work (green and healthy) or commute on a bus. Often I use my personal PC from home - accessing Outlook, internal web pages and applications.”

Today’s businesses are shifting to networking-based solutions and integrating it into their existing business processes and infrastructure. Take, for example, the healthcare sector, an area of considerable focus for Nortel. Living in Europe and traveling the world, I can attest to the problems many countries are facing. They need high-quality but affordable healthcare. And healthcare institutions are keen to meet these needs despite costs rising.

This is where Nortel’s Global Services can help, working with hospitals, doctors’ offices and other medical facilities to evaluate and adopt new communications technologies, like SPO, to make the staff more efficient, manage costs, and improve customer care.

A good example is Liverpool Women’s Hospital in the UK, which is implementing SPO to manage complicated network log-ins, security and protection of sensitive private data for midwives. This allows them to focus their time and energy on delivering excellent in-home care for women and babies. Or look at Carolinas HealthCare System, the third largest public healthcare system in the USA. They are using Nortel VoIP and multimedia contact center solutions to help safely and securely speed delivery of high-quality, personalized patient care while managing their costs.

Both of these examples demonstrate the importance of needs assessment, consulting, design, integration, security, solution training and other services Nortel offers from its Global Services portfolio to help healthcare institutions create and implement complete hardware and software solutions that uniquely address their needs.

Healthcare is just one of many verticals where Nortel can provide this consultative approach. Hospitality is another, and the phenomenal growth of large hotels in areas such as Dubai, Asia and Las Vegas is creating greater need for these services. Then there’s finance, education, government… all with a need to control costs and generate revenues while providing excellent customer service. And all candidates for the comprehensive Unified Communications, SPO, contact centers and other types of solutions Nortel has to offer.

A solution is more than just technology or products, it must include the hardware, software and services to address business problems in a manner that integrates seamlessly with existing processes and networks - and Nortel has the services and the expertise required to meet this challenge.