According to Pascual, one reason for the status quo is that most companies have already projected their expenditure for this year so all plans in the pipeline will push through. Another factor is that since most businesses in the country are classified as mid-sized, the impact, according to analysts, will be least felt by them compared to their multinational counterparts.

With a focus on the education, finance, contact center and hospitality markets, Nortel will put its efforts on expansion deals and corporate linkages. For instance, Pascual shared that they had recently sealed an agreement with the University of the East to connect their difference branches. Aside from UE, Nortel also forged academic partnerships with Asia Pacific College and University of San Carlos in Cebu to use and integrate their unified communication (UC) and voice over IP (VoIP) courseware in their curriculum.

These, according to Pascual, will assure that there will be enough skilled manpower for future UC and VoIP deployments in the country. "We saw a bucket of opportunities here that are worth investing our infrastructure on," stated Pascual.

Mark Fioretto, vice president for enterprise, Nortel South Asia pointed out that Nortel has been in the UC business for a long time, specifically in video and voice collaboration. Aside from this, Nortel is also leveraging its partnership with Microsoft (Innovative Communication Alliance) and IBM (Lotus Notes) to further strengthen their communications infrastructure capability to run across different systems for its diverse client portfolio. "We believe that in all future infrastructure deployments, UC is going to be a major consideration," said Fioretto.

Pascual agreed. "Two years after UC was introduced in the country, the awareness has really gone up as local deployment began last year," he said, adding that a huge part of UC integration among its clients is also due to the widespread PABX upgrades, which are now all in IP telephony, making it easier to implement UC and VoIP.