Ravi Chauhan, general manager of Communications Enabled Business Solutions, Nortel, said, "We understand that in today's environment customers are seeking the highest possible value in their investments to deliver tangible, financial returns on an in-year basis. Nortel's solutions can deliver those financial benefits and lay the foundation for a business' future success."
Nortel claims that its Agile Communication Environment (ACE) is a next-generation software platform aimed at fueling business agility and productivity. With ACE, communications functionality like instant messaging, voice, video, location, and presence can be quickly accessed via open Web Service interfaces. These capabilities can then be blended with business processes and tools such as customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning, GPS or WiFi asset tracking, and video monitoring to create powerful new applications.
Nortel is also rolling out Release 2.0, which includes a Hot Desking application to provide single number access to employees on any type of phone in any location. Employers can reportedly use Hot Desking to lower real estate costs by as much as 25 percent, reduce telecommunications costs for mobile employees by over 10 percent, improve customer care, increase worker productivity, and better prepare for emergencies.
ACE Release 2.0 also introduces a new global architecture to further enhance integration with IBM Lotus Sametime 8.0.2. This, Nortel claims, would help in broadening the application coverage of previously announced IBM Sametime integration for click-to-conference and enhanced presence capabilities. Additionally, Release 2.0 delivers support for the Microsoft Windows Server operating system and remote call control features for Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 (R2 Standard and Enterprise Editions).
As part of the announcement Nortel also introduced the Release v3.5 of its Media Processing Server (MPS), a Web-centric, IVR self-service system. Release v3.5 builds upon MPS' language capabilities with support of the latest IBM and Nuance speech engines. It is said that this would also include VoiceXML, to provide an environment for accelerating application development and an expanded third-party integration support into Avaya AES.