DUBAI, U.A.E. -- Dubai Financial Market (Suq Dubayy al-Mali) has improved its bandwidth, reliability and capacity for rapid recovery from natural disaster or network attack, implementing a financial services solution based on optical technology from Nortel(1) (Toronto:NT.TO - News)(NT - News) as part of its business continuity and contingency plans.

The Dubai Financial Market (DFM) is the United Arab Emirates' first official stock exchange and fifth biggest exchange market in the world in capitalization, trading over 105 billion shares in 2007. Deployed in conjunction with Nortel's system integrator, Beta Information Technology, this upgrade satisfies DFM's needs to support the increasing demands on its operational capabilities. A continuous, order-driven and fully automated trading system, as well as a transparent and automated information dissemination mechanism, have been implemented.

DFM now benefits thanks to Nortel from a 100 percent always-on, always-accessible network with complete redundancy and total security. This is essential to ensuring reliable and uninterrupted delivery of high-quality trading and information services to brokers, information suppliers and other market players that require guaranteed business availability vital for financial stock markets.

"In just five years the number of investors in our market has strongly increased from 126,000 to 627,000 in 2007 and our old network did not have enough bandwidth capacity or business continuity safeguards to handle this level of growth," said Hassan Abdulrahman Al Serkal, operation director, DFM. "Nortel's 10 Gigabit Ethernet technology ensures no single point of failure while supporting immense quantities of digital information that can be accessed immediately by all users."

In a separate release:

DUBAI, U.A.E. -- Dubai Municipality(2), the government body responsible for city services and the maintenance of facilities in the city of Dubai, has deployed a Nortel(1) (Toronto:NT.TO - News)(NT - News) data center solution for supporting e-Government services in the municipality. The solution supports current e-services such as the e-Permit system for enabling faster import of goods and the e-Complaint system for handling online complaints from Dubai residents and visitors as well as launching new on-line services.

The data center, designed and installed by Nortel and its regional channel partner Beta Information Technology(2), has a layered approach architecture with a services aggregation layer at its centre which makes adding or changing services simple for the IT staff.

With its new data center, the Dubai Municipality can play a more active role in the Dubai e-Government initiative set up in 2001 to improve interdepartmental communication and simplify procedures and transactions between citizens and the government of Dubai.

Dubai Municipality also wanted to ensure business continuity to guarantee availability of the services currently offered to its citizens and visitors as well as network access to shared resources to its more than 7000 staff. The staff oversee such services as drainage and irrigation; public health and safety; and development and construction schemes across the city. The new architecture now offers increased reliability and operational efficiency by implementing at least dual resilient connections to the network removing single point of failure.

"The new data centre architecture enables us to roll out new e-services like e-planning and offers more opportunities for e-participation as well as giving us the reliability and performance our staff needs," said Yousef Mohammad AlShaiba, head of Operations and Infrastructure, Dubai Municipality. "Nortel's data centre design has drastically simplified our operations and provided us with a growth path that is simple, allowing us to cost-effectively support the new needs of our municipality as it continues to grow."

In a separate release:

SHARJAH, U.A.E. -- Petrofac Limited,(2) an international oil and gas facilities service provider, is using a Nortel(1) (Toronto:NT.TO - News)(NT - News) data solution to enable staff at its Sharjah headquarters to communicate more efficiently with its factories, construction sites and offices around the world. The solution for Petrofac supports IP telephony and advanced multimedia conferencing to facilitate improved communications within the company.

With more than 10,000 employees, Petrofac operates out of four strategically located international centres, in Aberdeen, Scotland; Sharjah, UAE; Woking, UK; and Mumbai, India as well as 20 offices worldwide. The Petrofac business is mainly concentrated on the UK Continental Shelf, Africa, the Middle East, the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and the Asia Pacific region. With an extensive global footprint the availability of a reliable, secure and flexible communications network is seen as a significant element to its business success.

"Every second of every day, Petrofac people are at work in offices, offshore and at sites all over the world," said Mohan Narasimhan, chief information officer, Petrofac. "This always on global reach enables us to deliver highly responsive and cost-efficient services for our customers. That's why fast, highly reliable and secure access to information is critical for our business. By creating a stronger business information infrastructure we are not only improving our network but supporting our worldwide business strategy."

In a separate release:

RIYADH, SAUDI ARABIA -- Financial and brokerage services firm Arabian Capital(2) has deployed a robust, secure Unified Communications solution from Nortel(1) (Toronto:NT.TO - News)(NT - News) in its new Riyadh headquarters. The solution provides voice and data services such as mobility and real-time collaboration, making employees more productive and improving responsiveness to customers while reducing operational costs. Offering a full range of Islamic compliant investment solutions to the business community in the region, Arabian Capital also required a network solution that guaranteed business continuity, ensuring customers and staff stay connected - no matter what. Arabian Capital now has an "always-on" infrastructure providing uninterrupted services and dynamically adaptable security to stop threats as they occur.

The new infrastructure, designed and implemented by its regional partner Baud Telecom Company, has simplified communications through one-click access to email, voice, unified messaging for staff at headquarters.

To improve customer service, Nortel and BTC have provided Arabian Capital with multimedia call capabilities to ensure customers and investors are quickly connected to the right representatives and analysts with the most suitable expertise for their queries. "Nortel's technology has allowed us to implement a very reliable network that is critical to our financial and brokerage services," said Mohammad H. Al Suliman, vice president, chief operating officer, Arabian Capital. "Easy to manage and flexible, our new network will grow with our multi-market business needs and allow us to keep expanding communications that improve our services toward our investors. Our selection of Nortel provides our investors with state of art technologies to serve their needs and financial transactions in a reliable and secured manner."

Nortel Networks Ltd.