Nortel Unveils New IP Telephony Products
By consolidating voice and data traffic to a single network, convergence technology reduces management costs and helps businesses provide improved customer service, said Oscar Rodriguez, president of the enterprise networks business at Nortel, based here.
"You'll start to engage customers in a true form by understanding what each specific customer needs, by understanding what their buying patterns have been, by understanding what levels of customer service they need to have in order to continue to come back," Rodriguez said.
Release 2.0 of Nortel's Succession Communication Server for Enterprise (CSE) 1000 IP-PBX supports up to 1,000 users per server, an increase from 640 users per server in the previous release.
In addition, multiple CSE 1000s can now be networked together to support and centrally manage up to 10,000 users.
"Customers can start out with a single system and aggregate them to add horsepower as they grow. It provides more flexibility," said Kevin DiPaolo, senior vice president at Frontrunner Network Systems, a network integrator based in Rochester, NY.
The increased capacity makes Nortel a viable player against IP telephony vendors such as Cisco Systems and Siemens Enterprise Networks in the enterprise market, DiPaolo said.
The CSE 1000 upgrade also adds improved backup and survivability features as well as support for Nortel's digital phones and new i2002 IP phones.
Nortel also launched the next version of its unified messaging software, CallPilot 2.0, which adds 40 new features, including e-mail retrieval by phone through text-to-speech conversion.
CSE 1000 Release 2.0 costs $625 to $800 per line. CallPilot Release 2.0 starts at $400 per user. Both are scheduled for general availability on Oct. 31.
In addition, Nortel announced a new 24-port power-over-Ethernet switch, the BayStack 460-24T-PWR, which provides Quality of Service functionality for Voice over IP traffic.
The new switch costs $3,495 and is scheduled to ship in January.