BT to Sell Nortel Softswitch

LONDON -- BT, in partnership with Nortel Networks*, is launching an enterprise multimedia services platform. This marks another step in the evolution of BT's multimedia services capability, part of BT's network-centric ICT strategy.

BT will be one of the first Nortel Networks channels in Europe, Middle East and Africa to roll-out services on Nortel Networks new Multimedia Communication Server (MCS) 5100, announced today in a launch at CeBIT, Hanover and in London. BT will be the first company to offer the MCS5100 in the UK, promoting it with a targeted sales campaign to UK enterprises.

The partnership extends BT's existing capabilities in multimedia based on the work it has already done on real-time collaboration (BT Conferencing) and flexible working. BT intends to continually develop, launch and support multimedia services for this emerging market.

New multimedia services enabled by the Nortel Networks MCS5100 bring real-time communications including 'Click to Call', instant messaging, IP telephony, video calling, presence awareness, instant file transfer and personalised conferencing to a wider business user community.

"Multimedia services are an important and emerging market for BT," said Lucy Dimes, Director ICT & Strategic Partnerships BT Retail. "The announcement today brings BT one step closer to realising its vision for integrated multimedia where customers can consolidate all of their communication needs into a single device that can be used anywhere. Multimedia sits at the heart of convergence. The combination of BT's ICT capability and integration expertise and this partnership with Nortel Networks uniquely position us to guide customers through this complex area."

Approximately 80 BT managers and professionals are now engaged in internal user trials of the Nortel Networks MCS5100. The users are able to utilise the multimedia features of the MCS5100 over BT's Broadband, Openzone and LAN access whilst working from home, on the move or in the office. This increases their 'connected' time during the working day; raising productivity, reducing downtime and providing a better work-life balance. MCS5100 is particularly suited for this flexible, agile and dynamic business environment. For example, users working in dispersed project teams have found the integrated multimedia collaboration features very useful for 'real-time' decision-making on documents and presentations.

"The partnership with BT to deliver multimedia capability to its customers, and to BT itself as an end-user, demonstrates our continued focus on our 'One network. A world of choice' enterprise technology vision," said Ashley Gold, vice president BT account, Nortel Networks. "We are helping BT and its enterprise customers to move to a fully-converged network supporting a range of multimedia services that no other single product on the market can match."

Nortel Networks and BT have a long history of delivering next-generation solutions and services. The partnership to provide integrated multimedia solutions further builds upon the strength of that relationship and adds to existing partnerships covering Nortel Networks voice, data, optical and IP telephony portfolio. These new services will allow business customers to reach new levels of mobility, flexible working and productivity today while providing a real-time communications platform for many new and innovative applications in the future.

In today's market, both BT and Nortel Networks are working together as strategic partners convinced of the need to develop new types of relationships between telecommunications operators and equipment vendors in order to cope with the challenges of increasing competition and the convergence of the telecom, IT and multimedia industries.

BT Group plc

Nortel Networks Corp.