Winning bidders were Westcon Group and Horizon with Nortel’s EMEA Distribution Director Amanda Giddins commenting, “We chose Horizon for their Microsoft skills and their association with IBM; we wanted to target the IBM base with these products. Weston was chosen for their convergence skills.”
According to Nortel, SCS500 is capable of saving employees 30 to 50 minutes per day, and reduces conferencing costs up to 30%. Westcon will offer the SIP-centric solution to its UK-based reseller community. The introduction of SCS500 signals Nortel’s move into a new market targeting SMBs with 30 to 500+ employees in highly collaborative work environments, including finance, real estate, manufacturing, and professional services.
Tim Brooks, Sales and Marketing Director of Westcon Convergence, commented: “Our resellers continually look to us to help deliver more efficient communication systems to their customers. The flexibility SCS500 provides, given its open source architecture and SIP compatibility, will help resellers deliver measurable productivity benefits to a wide variety of SMBs that require diversity of vertically focused applications.”
‘Nortel’s SCS500 represents a unique mid-market opportunity for channel partners looking to move into unified communications, says Amanda Giddins, EMEA Distribution Leader of Nortel. “Westcon Convergence’s in-house training capabilities, marketing expertise and seamless on-boarding activities will help Nortel resellers attain faster time-to-revenue. Beyond this, Westcon has a very strong heritage in converged communications and are a known entity resellers can trust.”
Tom Jaques, Managing Director of London based 1st Communications added: “As SMBs become more sophisticated, they require network solutions that can carry everything from data, voice, videoconferencing and collaboration, as well as a myriad of advanced applications that demand a high performance network infrastructure. By winning the bid to distribute the SCS500, Westcon is helping resellers remain focused on the issues that count: business productivity and delivering the most competitive solutions available on the market today.”