Nortel Revs VOIP Network for Rolls-Royce

Rolls-Royce, a maker of industrial power systems, has signed a seven-year, $20 million deal with Nortel to build a new worldwide enterprise VOIP network, encompassing telephony, unified voice, fax and e-mail messaging, and a platform for advanced mobi

Rolls-Royce has signed a seven-year, $20 million deal with Nortel Networks to build a new worldwide enterprise voice-over-IP network.

The network is to encompass telephony, unified voice, fax and e-mail messaging, and a platform for advanced mobile collaboration.

"Nortels … ability to build large, reliable networks designed for delivery of new services convinced us to select it as our preferred communications provider," Jim Reed, IT purchasing director for Rolls-Royce, in London, said in a statement.

This division of Rolls-Royce, which has $12 billion in annual sales and makes industrial power systems, is separate from the Rolls-Royce automobile brand.

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Nortel will begin by taking over Rolls-Royces TDM network, which is built primarily of Mitel Networks equipment, along with some gear from Nortel and Siemens.

The new network will serve 26,500 users in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Norway, Germany and France.

"We will be managing their TDM network immediately and will convert it to VOIP. Were taking a legacy network of multiple vendors and will transition it to a converged network," said Curt Hopkins, vice president for services, sales and marketing at Nortel, also in London.

Hopkins said competing bidders for the contract included Siemens, Avaya and Cisco Systems.

Equipment in the new network will include the Nortel Communication Server 1000, Nortel CallPilot for unified voice, fax and e-mail communications, and Nortel mobility services.

Network management will include remote fault monitoring with proactive network surveillance, and customer-defined SLAs (service-level agreements) for response and resolution, according to Hopkins.

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