The UC-Ready Network
by Jake Power, Director of Marketing, Converged Data Networks, Nortel

Unified communications solutions are all about simplicity and speed. Improved productivity and reduced time-to-decision are a few results that can be realized. Yet enterprises wanting to reap the full benefits are faced with an important question: is their data network ready?

A UC-ready data network should score high in three key areas: performance, resiliency and energy efficiency. With one purpose-built for UC, companies can experience dramatic productivity gains and an excellent return on investment.

Customers are selecting Nortel as they look to replace legacy, proprietary data networks that are expensive and offer performance ill-suited to support the move to UC. In fact, Nortel recently showcased over 50 customers from around the globe who selected the company’s solutions over the competition.

City University, London was one. They were looking to build a business optimized network across four campuses and two academic centers.

Carl Stokes, IT director, stated, “We chose Nortel based on their ability to refresh our aging network with a resilient, scalable and secure design that was optimized to support our voice, video and data applications.”

While UC can effectively revolutionize the ways enterprises communicate, allowing them to drive increased productivity and realize the power of their network investment, there are other critical elements to drive reduced operational and capital expenses.

New solutions are poised to help enterprises maximize network capabilities and get the most out of IT investment. Nortel recently announced a new end-to-end network virtualization solution, which will be ship later this year. It enables elements of an enterprise network that were previously separated to work in unison, eliminating the need for costly network overhauls when additional capacity is required. Sophisticated capabilities are also possible through network virtualization. For example, bandwidth can be increased to one part of the network when videoconferencing use is high.

Creating a virtual network increases the speed and simplicity of commerce. It reduces the time to deploy new services and applications, add new networking elements and allows what are essentially different networks to be operated as a single entity. Nortel's solution features the Ethernet Routing Switch (ERS) 8600 5.0 coupled with the Virtual Services Switch 5000, a new platform that consolidates network elements and provides flexible and dynamic services on-the-fly with proven integration with server virtualization solutions.