Nortel Targets Services Growth With New Offerings, Simplified Packages
Toronto, Canada (ots/PRNewswire)
- Key Strategic Area to Drive Business Momentum - Zafirovski
Nortel(x) (NYSE: NT; TSX: NT) 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.
"I've 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.
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. Our next-generation technologies, for both service providers and enterprises, span access and core networks, support multimedia and business-critical applications, and help eliminate today's barriers to efficiency, speed and performance by simplifying networks and connecting people with information. 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.
Certain statements in this press release may contain words such as "could", "expects", "may", "anticipates", "believes", "intends", "estimates", "plans", "envisions", "seeks" and other similar language and are considered forward-looking statements or information under applicable securities legislation. These statements are based on Nortel's current expectations, estimates, forecasts and projections about the operating environment, economies and markets in which Nortel operates. These statements are subject to important assumptions, risks and uncertainties, which are difficult to predict and the actual outcome may be materially different. Although Nortel believes expectations reflected in such forward-looking statements are reasonable based upon the assumptions in this press release, they may prove to be inaccurate and consequently Nortel's actual results could differ materially from its expectations set out in this press release. Further, actual results or events could differ materially from those contemplated in forward-looking statements as a result of the following (i) risks and uncertainties relating to Nortel's restatements and related matters including: Nortel's recently announced restatement and two previous restatements of its financial statements and related events and that the previously filed financial statements of Nortel and NNL and related audit reports should not be relied upon; the negative impact on Nortel and NNL of their announced restatement and delay in filing their financial statements and related periodic reports causing them to breach their public debt indentures and obligations under their credit facilities with the possibility that the holders of their public debt or NNL's lenders would seek to accelerate the maturity of that debt; and causing a breach of NNL's support facility with EDC with the possibility that EDC would refuse to issue additional support under the facility, terminate its commitments under the facility or require NNL to cash collateralize all existing support; legal judgments, fines, penalties or settlements, or any substantial regulatory fines or other penalties or sanctions, related to the ongoing regulatory and criminal investigations of Nortel in the U.S. and Canada; any significant pending civil litigation actions not encompassed by Nortel's proposed class action settlement; any substantial cash payment and/or significant dilution of Nortel's existing equity positions resulting from the finalization and approval of its proposed class action settlement, or if such proposed class action settlement is not finalized, any larger settlements or awards of damages in respect of such class actions; any unsuccessful remediation of Nortel's material weaknesses in internal control over financial reporting resulting in an inability to report Nortel's results of operations and financial condition accurately and in a timely manner; the time required to implement Nortel's remedial measures; Nortel's inability to access, in its current form, its shelf registration filed with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and Nortel's below investment grade credit rating and any further adverse effect on its credit rating due to Nortel's restatement of its financial statements; any adverse affect on Nortel's business and market price of its publicly traded securities arising from continuing negative publicity related to Nortel's restatements; Nortel's potential inability to attract or retain the personnel necessary to achieve its business objectives; any breach by Nortel of the continued listing requirements of the NYSE or TSX causing the NYSE and/or the TSX to commence suspension or delisting procedures; any default in Nortel's filing obligations extending beyond May 9, 2006, causing any Canadian securities regulatory authority to impose an order to cease all trading in Nortel's securities within the applicable jurisdiction or to impose such an order sooner if Nortel fails to comply with the alternate information guidelines of such regulatory authorities; (ii) risks and uncertainties relating to Nortel's business including: yearly and quarterly fluctuations of Nortel's operating results; reduced demand and pricing pressures for its products due to global economic conditions, significant competition, competitive pricing practice, cautious capital spending by customers, increased industry consolidation, rapidly changing technologies, evolving industry standards, frequent new product introductions and short product life cycles, and other trends and industry characteristics affecting the telecommunications industry; any material and adverse affects on Nortel's performance if its expectations regarding market demand for particular products prove to be wrong or because of certain barriers in its efforts to expand internationally; any reduction in Nortel's operating results and any related volatility in its market price of its publicly traded securities arising from any decline in its gross margin, or fluctuations in foreign currency exchange rates; any negative developments associated with Nortel's supply contract and contract manufacturing agreements including as a result of using a sole supplier for key optical networking solutions components, and any defects or errors in Nortel's current or planned products; any negative impact to Nortel of its failure to achieve its business transformation objectives; restrictions on how Nortel and its president and chief executive officer conduct its business arising from a settlement with Motorola Inc.; additional valuation allowances for all or a portion of its deferred tax assets; Nortel's failure to protect its intellectual property rights, or any adverse judgments or settlements arising out of disputes regarding intellectual property; changes in regulation of the Internet and/or other aspects of the industry; Nortel's failure to successfully operate or integrate its strategic acquisitions, or failure to consummate or succeed with its strategic alliances; any negative affect of Nortel's failure to evolve adequately its financial and managerial control and reporting systems and processes, manage and grow its business, or create an effective risk management strategy; and (iii) risks and uncertainties relating to Nortel's liquidity, financing arrangements and capital including: the impact of Nortel's recently announced restatement and two previous restatements of its financial statements; any acceleration under their public debt indentures and credit facilities, which may result in Nortel and NNL being unable to meet their respective payment obligations; any inability of Nortel to manage cash flow fluctuations to fund working capital requirements or achieve its business objectives in a timely manner or obtain additional sources of funding; high levels of debt, limitations on Nortel capitalizing on business opportunities because of credit facility covenants, or on obtaining additional secured debt pursuant to the provisions of indentures governing certain of Nortel's public debt issues and the provisions of its credit facilities; any increase of restricted cash requirements for Nortel if it is unable to secure alternative support for obligations arising from certain normal course business activities, or any inability of Nortel's subsidiaries to provide it with sufficient funding; any negative affect to Nortel of the need to make larger defined benefit plans contributions in the future or exposure to customer credit risks or inability of customers to fulfill payment obligations under customer financing arrangements; any negative impact on Nortel's ability to make future acquisitions, raise capital, issue debt and retain employees arising from stock price volatility and further declines in Nortel's market price of its publicly traded securities, or any future share consolidation resulting in a lower total market capitalization or adverse affect on the liquidity of Nortel's common shares. For additional information with respect to certain of these and other factors, see Nortel's securities filings with the SEC. Unless otherwise required by applicable securities laws, Nortel disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.
(x)Nortel, the Nortel logo and the Globemark are trademarks of Nortel Networks.
Contact:
Mark Buford, +1-(972)-684-8512, mark.buford@nortel.com