Nortel Buzzboard

Nortel announced in a press release today that HSBC, one of the worlds largest banking and financial services organizations, has selected a Nortel unified communications solution.

HSBC’s work with Nortel will start with a global pilot within the HSBC London Headquarters that will connect 1,000 executive staff in London.  The broader goal is to extend the UC network to more than 50,000 users across HSBC’s global operating areas in North America, Europe and Latin America.

To better and more rapidly integrate the new UC functionality into HSBC’s existing comms infrastructure, HSBC is also using the Nortel Agile Communication Environment (ACE) -which leverages Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and web-services.

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CRN Australia has a great article today about RMIT, a university based in Melbourne that is working with Nortel to completely update their network across three main campuses and 150 sites.  Nortel actually announced the contract with RMIT back in February, but this article by CRN Australia goes into great detail on their plans and progress via an interview with Allan Morris, the executive director of IT services for RMIT.

The end goal of the 2+ year, $10 million project is a campus-wide VoIP and unified communications network, as well as a variety of new communications and collaboration services.

RMIT will use the Nortel CS 1000 IP-PBX and MCS 5100 will be …

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We have a winner.

Over the past few weeks we have let you, our faithful readers, vote on which of five videos best conveyed our energy efficiency message.  Three of the videos were “homemade” by some of our talented Nortel employees.  The two others were created through the traditional advertising channels.

Your response was tremendous.  These five videos received tens of thousands of views over the last few weeks, and this blog has had tens of thousands of pageviews.  We also received well over 1,000 votes.

While I have to admit that I was rooting for for the underdog, and for one of the employee-created videos to win — in the end it was the professionally-created Nortel “Piles” Commercial …

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Over the last few weeks I’ve shown you two new Nortel TV commercials, as well as three really well-done videos on energy efficiency that were “homemade” by a few talented Nortel employees.  But the response from employees wasn’t limited to just the three videos that are part of the voting.

We received a dozen videos — all of them great in their own way.  But we couldn’t include all the videos in the vote.  So in order to give an “honorable mention” to some of the other employee efforts, I’m going to post another energy efficiency video that you haven’t seen yet.

Below, this high-energy video highlights the energy efficiency benefits of Nortel solutions.

And a quick update on the …

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A few weeks ago, I did a Q&A with Kieth Weiner right after Nortel announced the acquisition of DiamondWare the 3D audio specialist company he founded.

Thanks to a link from John Roese on his blog, today I listened to a nice audio demo of what 3D audio (or spatial audio) can do for a conference call situation.  You can listen to the demo below.  I highly suggest you use stereo headphones to get the full effect.

The first thing you’ll notice is the dramatically improved sound quality of the voices.  If you’re like me, you are all too familiar with the low-quality voice common with today’s conference call bridges.

The focus of the demo though is how call participants can …

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In just six months, “Going green” in the IT/telecom industry has gone from a topic nobody cared about to a topic big enough to get coverage at the business press level.  Nortel, of course, is heavily focused on the topic of energy efficiency — but companies across the industry are also making energy and environmental conservation a focal point.

In an article this morning in the Globe & Mail — “New tech battleground: Who’s the greenest?” — Nortel and various other major IT companies are highlighted for their efforts to use “green” as a competitive advantage.

The article says “Perhaps no tech player is embracing the green mantra as aggressively as Nortel Networks Corp.” — and interviews Net Payne, Nortel’s …

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It’s been over a decade since I last studied Statistics in college, but I still remember a few things from it (no matter how much I’d like to forget everything about that class).  One thing I know, is that a sample size of 400+ people for a survey is considered “statistically relevant.”

So yesterday morning when I checked out the voting count for the video contest, I thought we had a pretty clear winner.  The Nortel “Piles” commercial had a comfortable lead atop the voting, with the employee-created “sock and sandals” video a good 8-10% behind.  Everyone else was far back in the pack, presumably without any chance of winning.

But as the day went on yesterday, it …

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$6,100,000,000 — that’s $6.1 billion with a ‘B’.

That big number is the estimated amount of money that the “Cisco Energy Tax” has cost businesses over the last five years.  According to Nortel’s latest calculations, organizations around the world have collectively spent an estimated $6.1 billion* more on energy expenses in the last five years than they needed to.

[Reminder: Vote for your favorite video –>]

How exactly did we get that number?  Nortel took installed data/voice networks numbers from analyst firm Dell’Oro Group and crunched them through the Nortel Energy Efficiency Calculator (NEEC).  Over the five-year period from ‘04-’07 and pro-rated YTD 2008, businesses have paid $6.1 billion* more in energy costs to power and cool Cisco …

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Last week here on Buzzboard, we showed you three employee-created, “homemade” videos that all used unique ways to get across Nortel’s energy efficiency message.  If you didn’t get to see any of the employee videos, you can find them below.

Today you get to see two brand new, professionally created commercials that Nortel has started airing on CNN.  Like the employee-created videos, these new Nortel commercials focus on energy efficiency — but they do it in a very direct way that I think creates a tremendous impact to the viewer.

There are two different commercials, and both are below for your viewing pleasure.

WATCH IT NOW:
Nortel “Holes” Commercial
 

There’s …

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In the U.S. and Canada we have a long weekend coming up with a Monday holiday, which also means a drop in readership the Friday before (which is today).  So we’ll pick up the next post for this contest on Tuesday after the holiday break.

If you haven’t been following contest, now is a great chance to catch-up.  The easiest way it to go to the contest home page.  You can also see all the Buzzboard posts related to the contest here.

Next week we’ll unveil the new Nortel commercial soon to be aired on CNN.  I’m also hoping to show a few of the employee-created videos that didn’t make the voting cut.  And of course, the most important thing …

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