Nortel Recognized by Frost & Sullivan for Best Bang for the Buck Award in EMEA ACD Systems Market

Business Wire, May 4, 2005

PALO ALTO, Calif. -- Frost & Sullivan's recent analysis, EMEA ACD Systems Market, selected Nortel(a) as the recipient of the 2004 Best Bang for the Buck Award in recognition of the value its contact centre solutions provide to customers.

Every year, Frost & Sullivan presents this Award to the company that has provided customers with the solution and/or service that enables them to achieve the highest ratio of value to cost. The recipient has offered customers a product that provides quality, while staying extremely competitive in terms of prices.

"Nortel's customer contact solutions provide complete end-to-end functionality, yielding excellent customer satisfaction -- with a broad portfolio spanning multimedia contact centre solutions, self-service, advanced speech, voice portal, IP contact centre, and CTI," says Frost & Sullivan Research Analyst S.V. Purushothaman.

The company's multimedia customer contact portfolio includes the Symposium(a) Call Center Server, Symposium Express Call Center, Symposium Web Center Portal, Symposium Agent, Symposium Agent Greeting, Call Center Management Information System, Business Communication Manager Call Center and the CallPilot(a) 100/150 for Norstar(a).

Nortel's flagship contact centre solution, Symposium Call Center Server, scales up to over 3,000 agent positions at a single node and over 60,000 agents in a virtual contact centre. It provides multi-faceted skill-based routing and call handling decisions based on customer and real-time information, and comprehensive reporting and administration.

Symposium Web Center Portal is a suite of Windows server-based multimedia applications for managing telephony and Web-based customer interactions -- email, web, phone or fax -- expanding traditional call centres into multimedia contact centres.

Serving the mid to low end of the market is Nortel's Symposium Express Call Center, which provides predefined call handling with point & click wizard-driven management, and the Business Communication Manager (BCM) Call Center for small office applications, which can simply turned on by a software keycode.

Nortel's average list price for an agent starts approximately at US$400 in EMEA making Nortel's solutions one of the most competitive in the market. Nortel also offers attractive discounts for its installed base to migrate from older solutions to the Symposium suite of solutions. Its contact centre solutions provide the highest value to price ratio in the automatic call distribution (ACD) systems market, thus helping Nortel maintain its position as the second leading vendor in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) in terms of shipments. Nortel is the leading vendor in terms of shipments for 2003 and 2004 in the Middle East and Africa region, holding a 35.3 percent market share in 2004.

The company's contact centre solutions work both in circuit-switched and packet-switched environments making them extremely attractive for smaller enterprises and green field customers. Nortel is planning to further enhance its value-to-price ratio by integrating session initiated protocol (SIP) functionality into its contact centre solutions and have them support new and emerging wireless communications channels such as 3G wireless video, chat and instant messaging. Nortel's SIP initiative will provide a simplified integration of business applications and the infrastructure with the contact centre, increasing return on investment (ROI) for the enterprise and productivity for the agents.

Though the global economy is on its path to recovery, customers are still sceptical and wary about capital expenditure, and are interested in the products that will provide the most value for the price they are paying for them -- Nortel's contact centre solutions definitely fit this requirement. Value-to-cost ratio is particularly important in EMEA. For successfully catering to this market, Nortel is the deserving recipient of the Frost & Sullivan 2004 Best Bang for the Buck Award.

About Frost & Sullivan

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(a) Nortel, Symposium, CallPilot and Norstar are trademarks of Nortel Networks.