FRANKFURT, Germany -- ITERGO, the internal information services (IS) provider for ERGO, Germany's number two primary insurance provider serving 31 million customers throughout Europe, has established one of the first resilient packet rings (RPR) in Germany using a next generation optical platform from Nortel (NYSE:NT)(TSX:NT). This platform builds on Nortel's RPR leadership and proven carrier-grade technology and results in a highly resilient communications network, enabling a distributed IS architecture over a single optical infrastructure.

Using the efficiency and scalability offered by 2.5G RPR gives ERGO a customised, high performance solution for reducing the complexity of its existing infrastructure while meeting current and future application needs of the four main German insurance companies within its group.

Nortel provided the RPR platform under an agreement with ERGO announced in June 2004 to supply products, deployment and services.

The RPR platform enables ITERGO to optimize the infrastructure, establish a multiservice platform and standardize the IT processes throughout the ERGO main offices in Duesseldorf, Hamburg, Cologne and Munich. Through these advantages, ERGO is able to realize significant operational cost reductions in its IT environment and maximize the underlying business advantage through higher availability of applications, use of existing distributed IT assets and expert resources, and partitioning of critical assets for business continuity. New applications linking virtual networked communities will now be possible at a fraction of the cost previously payable.

"We are currently developing our company to be one of the most successful IT service providers in the financial industry," said Dietmar Schoeler, head of department engineering networking at ITERGO."Our first German resilient packet ring enables us to target our solutions to our client demands. We need reliable and high performance network technology, and Nortel's technology enabled us to offer it in a customised and cost-effective way."

Nortel Networks Ltd.