Nortel today reinforced its commitment to growing its services business by unveiling a sweeping simplification of its integrated services and a series of new commercial services offerings.

"We have identified services as one of the key strategic areas to drive our business momentum and growth," said Mike Zafirovski, president and CEO, Nortel. "Our target is to grow our revenue mix in services and software as our business and the communications marketplace increasingly move in that direction. We are expanding what is already a robust collection of services offerings."

"Nortel understands how to design, deploy, support and evolve networks spanning the needs of enterprises and service providers from wireline to wireless and voice to data," said David Downing, Nortel's acting president of Global Services. "Companies need a solutions provider who understands the complexities of these converging environments and offers the full spectrum of services to address the complete lifecycle of their networks."

To better address this strategic area, Nortel is significantly simplifying its services business, focusing on multi-vendor integration, new technology migration, operating expense reduction and other specific business challenges where Nortel has unique strengths and expertise.

Nortel has organized its services business into five key areas - Integration Services, Security Services, Managed Services, Optimization Services and Maintenance Services. Customers will be able to order bundled services designed to help them develop and maintain secure network environments, transform and evolve their networks, focus on core business and improve network performance.

To drive new growth in services, Nortel has introduced several new commercial offerings, including:

• IPTV Integration Services - a complete Integration Services offering that provides a single point-of-contact for multi-vendor network design, lab certification, engineering, configuration and acceptance testing of IPTV services. This will enable service providers to deploy and deliver new 'triple play' services more quickly and cost-effectively. Nortel has opened a new multi-vendor IPTV integration lab on its Ottawa campus.
  
  VoIP Integration Services - another multi-vendor Integration Services offering, intended to speed carrier time-to-revenue by promoting smooth and reliable VoIP services deployment. One lead customer has already used Nortel VoIP Integration Services to launch residential VoIP in more than 60 rural markets.
• Security Consulting Services - a Security Services offering that combines risk assessment, incident response, cyber forensics and policy development to help customers make informed security decisions and mitigate network security risks.
• Hosted Services - a Managed Services offering that involves 'hosting' such network services as call centers, voice and multimedia on Nortel-owned equipment. Hosted Services allow customers to reduce or eliminate costs associated with operating, maintaining and evolving their own networks. Bharti Tele-Ventures in India has signed a five-year agreement with Nortel for hosted call center services.
• Subscriber Quality of Experience Service - an Optimization Services offering that uses unique metrics from actual subscriber data to benchmark and provide recommendations for optimum end-to-end performance of wireless data networks. Lead customer Vodafone Italy used this patent-pending tool to help optimize end-to-end delivery of streaming video services from content source through the network to subscriber mobiles.
• Multi-Vendor Repair and Managed Spares Services - Maintenance Services offerings that provide a single point-of-contact for repair services and spares management covering equipment from Nortel and most other major telecommunications equipment vendors. Two North American service providers recently became the first to take advantage of these services, consolidating hardware maintenance for more than 100,000 multi-vendor network elements for an anticipated 20 percent reduction in repair costs over the next year.

Nortel also announced today a new Advanced Mobility Services Center in Buenos Aires, Argentina that will offer wireless network planning, deployment, integration and optimization.