MX250 Enterprise Media Exchange. Zultys Technologies, (408) 328-0450. www.zultys.com
Nortel's proposal was solid, and its unified-messaging capabilities are about the best in the industry. Unfortunately, its $248,500 price was $77,000 higher than the next most-expensive response. This really hurt Nortel in our ratings.
The company proposed a lot of hardware, much of which is also used in its higher-end systems. The phones are full-featured, and Nortel proposed the Polycom Soundstation for conference phones (the analog version). It did say that it plans to introduce a conference phone that supports SIP as well as its proprietary protocol. In fact, we discerned a trend: As with Avaya, Nortel claims to support SIP but did not propose any third-party SIP products, which could have helped it pricewise. The company did list the ipDialog Manitone SIP phone as being supported under its presence application. Nortel's presence application was impressive, with a long list of features that included the ability to exchange files, whiteboarding and point-to-point video calling. It does not work with groupware calendaring systems--an unfortunate lapse, as this is an obvious way to provide presence status.
Nortel's CallPilot unified-messaging offering is the best of the bunch. It works with all the major e-mail packages, and it has speech-recognition capabilities that make it possible to turn many telephone keypad functions into hands-free speech commands.
Succession 1000 3.0 and Multimedia Communication Server (MCS) 5100 2.0, $248,500. Nortel Networks, (800) 4NORTEL. www.nortelnetworks.com
Subsea cable alternatives can provide a level of comfort for those concerned about disruptions. Realistically, they will continue to play a small, but critical role in the short term.
Maintaining existing network infrastructures often incurs huge technical debt before newer technologies are adopted over time.
Amid ongoing regional uncertainties, telecom infrastructure in the Middle East has expand to include terrestrial low-latency network infrastructure, which offers resilience and agility in navigating political complexities without relying solely on undersea networks.
