Nortel Makes Hosted Solutions Ready-To-Go For Enterprises, Service Providers

TORONTO – Implementing the very latest communications tools to help increase employee productivity and enhance customer satisfaction once required enterprises to invest significant time and expense in buying, integrating, supporting and maintaining new network hardware and software. No more, thanks to a new portfolio of hosted communications solutions available from Nortel* [NYSE/TSX: NT] through service providers.

Nortel Hosted Solutions are packaged and ready-to-go for enterprises seeking the benefits of next-generation applications without high risk or cost. Service providers also benefit because Nortel hosts and manages all elements of these solutions, allowing them to add new sources of revenue without significant new capital investments.

“Our customers want simple solutions that allow them to focus on their businesses, not their networks,” said Dietmar Wendt, president, Global Services, Nortel. “And service providers want help in providing these solutions. Nortel Hosted Solutions address both needs.”

Nortel Hosted Solutions include IP telephony, unified communications, automatic call distribution (ACD), contact centers and other network application services delivered to enterprises through service providers using equipment owned and managed by Nortel.

Nortel hosts and manages these applications from facilities around the world, supported by a global ecosystem of partners and market readiness programs. This includes Nortel Hosted Solutions Centers in Research Triangle Park, N.C. and Istanbul, Turkey and another one scheduled to open later this year in Frankfurt, Germany. Nortel also provides application performance engineering services to help optimize distributed application deployment.

Nortel Hosted Solutions are available for sale by service providers as new offerings or as a complement to their existing capabilities. Service providers can use Nortel Hosted Solutions to provide one or more network application services on a long-term basis, or temporarily to bring applications to market more quickly and less expensively while building them into their own networks.

“Nortel has enabled us to rapidly introduce a suite of IP telephony and unified communications capabilities that meet the needs of enterprise businesses across the country,” said Robert D. Shingler, president and chief executive officer of Cypress Communications, an Atlanta-based provider of managed communications solutions.

Cypress has used Nortel’s Hosted Solutions Center in Research Triangle Park to support more than 15 U.S. customers since January, and plans to transition to its own VoIP network based on Nortel’s Communication Server 2000 in June.

Nortel has announced agreements to provide Nortel Hosted Solutions for customers around the world, including IP telephony for TELMEX in Mexico and GISAD Telekom in Turkey and IVR for Bharti Airtel in India. Nortel also announced in March that it will help enable service providers to host comprehensive unified communications services for small- and medium-sized businesses as part of its Innovative Communications Alliance with Microsoft.

Nortel will demonstrate hosted IP telephony and unified communications applications from the Nortel Hosted Solutions Center in RTP at Interop Las Vegas May 22-24, 2007.

Nortel Hosted Solutions are part of the Nortel Global Services portfolio, which offers a full range of network application, implementation, management and support services for end-to-end, multi-vendor, multi-technology networks.