“There is a transformation taking place in today’s enterprise as businesses increasingly rely on instantaneous communications to keep a competitive edge. This need for total connectedness is creating an explosion in real-time voice, video and data, that are placing a staggering load on enterprise networks,” said Mike Zafirovski, Nortel president and CEO. “Nortel calls this trend Hyperconnectivity, and with it comes complexity and costs that will fundamentally change how businesses will deploy new applications and the networks that support them.”
“Nortel will help transform the modern enterprise. We are investing and putting into place the piece parts to really grow our enterprise business,” said Zafirovski. “It’s not about piling on new network layers, it’s about conserving legacy investments and powering new applications with simple solutions that bring new levels of consolidation, virtualisation and more.”
Nortel’s data strategy – called Business Optimised Networking – is focused on creating a network that seamlessly sustains and enhances the communications tools and applications that are the foundation of today’s businesses.
Nortel has created five building blocks to optimise the transformed enterprise, supporting unified communications and other business applications, while simplifying and consolidating the network to improve manageability and reduce costs. The five building blocks are:
Converge your core. As enterprise networks converge they are being asked to handle more diverse network traffic with higher reliability and intelligence. Nortel say recent additions to their Ethernet Routing Switch portfolio enable enterprise LANs to intelligently prioritise real-time business communications like voice, video, and multimedia services. The company adds that their portfolio provides cost-per-gigabit of throughput that is up to five times less than the leading competitor.
Extend your enterprise. Extending the same functionality and quality of service to branch locations that is available at the company’s headquarters has long been an enterprise challenge. Nortel is today unveiling the new Secure Router (SR) 4134 as the latest edition to its secure router portfolio to simplify the challenge of extending “enterprise-quality” communications tools and applications, like UC, to the branch office.
Mobilise your employees. Today’s mobile worker makes it crucial for enterprises to sustain employee productivity while on the go. Enhancements to Nortel’s WLAN portfolio provide a mobile access solution optimised to support the demands of VoIP and real-time multimedia services.
Accelerate your applications. As workers become increasingly mobile and remote, enterprises must provide users with continuous access to business critical applications. The Nortel Application Accelerator introduced today enables businesses to improve the performance of their centralised web-based applications.
Secure and manage your infrastructure. A truly business optimised network must be secure and easy to manage from end to end. Nortel say their depth of experience and robust services portfolio in this area contributed to recent wins.
Product Details
Announced today with initial availability in third quarter 2007, Nortel’s Secure Router 4134 is designed to streamline the number of disparate networking devices found in today’s branch offices by integrating WAN routing, Ethernet switching, Security and IP telephony into a single, cost effective platform. As a true unified communications (UC) ready platform, the Secure Router 4134 provides the foundation for extending high quality unified voice, video and multimedia to the enterprise branch.
Secure Router 4134 is the platform for the UC integrated branch solution unveiled in January that is a key part of Nortel and Microsoft Corp.’s Innovative Communications Alliance (ICA) joint roadmap. With integration scheduled for first quarter 2008, Nortel expects it to be the first device of its kind to incorporate Microsoft Mediation technology, ensuring seamless integration into an ICA unified communications environment.
“The future introduction of Secure Router 4134 with Microsoft Mediation technology is a proof point to the ongoing momentum of our alliance with Microsoft. It will allow us to deliver a high-performance, cost-effective branch office solution for enterprises deploying Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 in their corporate headquarters,” said Steve Slattery, president, Enterprise Solutions, Nortel.
To address enterprises’ growing mobility needs, Nortel today also introduced WLAN 2300 enhancements, which will be available in the third quarter of 2007. A new WLAN Security Switch, Access Point and software release are being introduced that provide greater WLAN scalability, performance, and enhanced deployment flexibility. Additionally, a new Location Engine will deliver integrated location services. Nortel is also introducing a WLAN traffic forwarding architecture that can relieve potential bottlenecks associated with centralised architectures.
The Nortel Application Accelerator, also announced today and generally available in May 2007, increases worker productivity and satisfaction by accelerating web-based applications. Optimised for leading applications from Microsoft and IBM, the Application Accelerator also saves money by reducing server and bandwidth needs.
In addition to being able to accelerate any web-based application, the Application Accelerator comes with profiles specifically optimised and tested for Microsoft’s Outlook Web Access, Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and IBM WebSphere Portal, making it simple to get the most out of today’s most popular business applications.