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Nortel adds SMB, medium business UC hardware
Unfazed by predictions of doom by market analysts, Nortel continues to roll out new products, this time aiming at the SMB and medium-sized business sectors with data and UC server offerings.
"We've been pretty vocal," said Nortel VP Wes Durow. "We've placed a bet, we're going to grow and invest in the enterprise space. We've been focused on the UC portfolio with Microsoft and IBM on the larger side... the announcements extend our UC story to SMBs."
The first product announced today, Nortel's Business Communications Manager (BCM) 450, is aimed at medium-sized businesses and will support up to 300 employees. It is designed, in part, to be a replacement box for "tens of thousands" of deployed Norstar systems. It will provide a growth path to IP while delivering UC and leveraging the existing investment in existing infrastructure, including cable and handsets. Durow said channel partners have been "very vocal" about the need to release the product and said it had been brought to market two months in advance due to channel demand.
UC features being delivered on the BCM 450 include unified messaging, meet-me conferencing for up to 120 participants, CTI integration for use with third-party applications and intelligent call center functionality. A message forwarding capability to direct voicemails and faxes to the most convenient desktop or mobile device is expected to be available in "one or two months."
On the data side of the house, the BSG 8 and 12 series are (almost) all-in-one devices combining the functions of wired and wireless switching, router, firewall, VPN and intrusion detection, SIP gateway with integrated ATA, and Quality of Service (QoS) prioritizing into one box. The QoS functional is described as application aware, so voice and video should get priority on the network over vanilla data traffic.
The BSG 8 can support up to 50 concurrent SIP sessions and the manufacturers suggested retail price is $1,316. The BSG 12 supports up to 100 concurrent SIP sessions and runs from $3,377 to $4,198, depending on configuration.
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Comments
Posted by Anonymous | October 8, 2008 - 11:01am
Your opening paragraph makes it sound like Nortel waved a magic wand and developed these products overnight. They'd been in the pipeline for months if not a year or more -- the BCM450 has been expected for months. (The real surprise is Nortel getting anything out the door early -- which in Nortel-land means "on time").
If you want to understand what impacts their financials will have on R&D, wait until 2010 and later.
That said, Nortel continues the overuse of the "UC" acronym du jour. The BCM 450 is NOT UC, it's UM; there is no presence component. And if Norstar users were so amped to upgrade, all but the largest would have already done so with the other BCM models.
What the BCM 450 does is enable resellers to not have to wheel in the CS1000 for all deals over 150 users -- as is typically done now.
And finally, who gives a flip anyway? Anyone not buying the SCS500 is wasting money. Clearly that software code (they liked it so much they bought the company; Pingtel) is the future direction for Nortel. It's their way to get away from 35-year-old Meridian software masquerading as CS1000 code that simply can't shed it's proprietary refrigerator and air-conditioner hardware legacy.
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