Frost & Sullivan Recognizes Nortel Leadership in the IVR Market

Business Wire, Feb 22, 2005

PALO ALTO, Calif. -- Frost & Sullivan's recent analysis, U.S. IVR Systems Market, selected Nortel as the recipient of the 2004 Market Leadership Award in recognition of maintaining the lead in the U.S. Interactive Voice Response (IVR) market. Nortel accomplished this by working closely with its large installed base, pursuing an aggressive speech initiative, and offering customers innovative new products.

Nortel has introduced an array of successful self-service solutions, including the widely used Voice Processing Series/Information Server (VPS/is) and its voice processing platform for the future, the Media Processing Server (MPS) series.

Nortel's MPS software is highly scalable, addressing the entire range of the market. At the low end, it has been ported into Nortel's Business Communication Manager (BCM) converged voice and data switch as a software option that can be turned on by just a keycode. At the high-end, it scales to over 11,000 ports in one managed cluster, serving large enterprises and service providers.

"Nortel offers the same self-service product quality and attributes of its largest carrier grade product (MPS 1000) to even its smallest business offering (BCM-IVR)," says Frost & Sullivan Industry Analyst Seema Lall. "The MPS 500 is its flagship self-service product for most enterprises -- available with both speech and IP capabilities."

Nortel continues to increase deployments of speech technology in its self-service solutions. In fact, Nortel claims one of the industry's highest implementation rates of speech technologies in its IVR systems. The Nortel Speech Server supports advanced speech recognition, text to speech, and speaker verification. The client-server architecture makes sure that the performance remains optimal regardless of the speech processing algorithm vendor and complexity of the speech application.

Nortel's Web-Centric Self-Service (WCSS) provides a novel range of self-service options for companies that wish to leverage their existing Web infrastructure. Some important features include an open standards-based approach supporting Voice eXtensible Markup Language (VXML) for voice dialogs, Call Control eXtensible Markup Language (CCXML) for call control, a complete suite of tools for development, testing, and deployment called the Web-Centric Voice Applications Development Suite, and IP for communications.

WCSS offers several value-add benefits such as reduced application development time and the ability to create sophisticated self-service applications that combine advanced speech processing capabilities of media servers with the limitless data resources of the Web.

"WCSS enables enterprises to adapt their self-service applications to new standards, as VXML scripts on these platforms can stand alone or inter-work with applications created by Nortel's MPS Developer," notes Lall.

Each year, the Frost & Sullivan Market Leadership Award is presented to the company that has substantially increased its market share by offering innovative solutions in addition to executing sound marketing and market engineering strategies. For the above mentioned reasons, Frost & Sullivan is pleased to recognize Nortel with the 2004 Market Leadership Award in the U.S. IVR market.

About Nortel

Nortel is a recognized leader in delivering communications capabilities that enhance the human experience, ignite and power global commerce, and secure and protect the world's most critical information. Serving both service provider and enterprise customers, Nortel delivers innovative technology solutions encompassing end-to-end broadband, Voice over IP, multimedia services and applications, and wireless broadband designed to help people solve the world's greatest challenges. Nortel does business in more than 150 countries. For more information, visit Nortel on the Web at www.nortel.com. For the latest Nortel news, visit www.nortel.com/news.> About Frost & Sullivan

Frost & Sullivan, a global growth consulting company founded in 1961, partners with clients to create value through innovative growth strategies. The foundation of this partnership approach is our Growth Partnership Services platform, whereby we provide industry research, marketing strategies, consulting, and training to our clients to help grow their business. A key benefit that Frost & Sullivan brings to its clients is a global perspective on a broad range of industries, markets, technologies, econometrics, and demographics. With a client list that includes Global 1000 companies, emerging companies, as well as the investment community, Frost & Sullivan has evolved into one of the premier growth consulting companies in the world. For more information, visit www.frost.com.

Nortel is a trademark of Nortel Networks.