Verizon Adds Managed Nortel VOIP Service

Verizon Business is giving its nod of approval to Nortel Network's alliance with Microsoft with a new managed service for Nortel's IP PBX.

Verizon Business, which already offers a managed service for Cisco Systems' IP PBX products, on Dec. 10 added Nortel's Communication Server 1000 IP-PBX, Business Communications Manager branch-office IP PBX and CallPilot voice mail platform to its portfolio of managed services.

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"What's unique about Nortel is that they've announced a very well-connected integration strategy with Microsoft. There is a lot of industry discussion related to using Microsoft's Office Communicator that launches the Unified Communication applications. Lots of people have that client on the desktop already," said Laurie Shook, manager of managed IP telephony for Verizon Business.

The new Nortel IP PBX managed service will include the full life cycle of on-premises equipment management, from implementation and deployment through fault, configuration accounting, performance and security management.

"We identify problems, fix and troubleshoot the network, configure servers and routers, and we manage it, take care of asset management and then do performance reporting. If there are not immediate but potential problems, we can identify and take proactive action instead of reactively fixing a break. Then we do a security assessment that looks at how those issues affect VOIP [voice over IP]," Shook said.

To read more about other managed VOIP services, click here.

As a part of the new Nortel IP PBX managed service, Verizon Business will offer 100 percent platform availability service-level agreements and call completion guarantees, as well as guarantee actual voice quality based on a Mean Opinion Score of 4.0.

Verizon Business has to date provided implementation and deployment services for 155,000 Nortel Time Division Multiplexing-based Nortel PBXes and 4,800 IP PBXes.

The Nortel-based managed service, due in January, is aimed at large enterprises that prefer managed network services to in-house support.

In a separate announcement, Verizon Business also added support in its IP trunking services for Nortel's Communications Server 1000 5.0 release, and will allow customers to use idle trunk capacity in one location to accommodate an increase in traffic from another location.

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