Nortel goes big with new voice

New Delhi, Oct 5 (UNI) Nortel India, the regional arm of the Canada-based global networking infrastructure major, today marked its foray into the small and medium business segment with the launch of new voice and data enabled solutions.

The company's new product range includes switches, routers and access points tailor-made for the small businesses promising an effective and easy-to-implement usage of products at highly competitive prices.

''The SMB market in India consists of about 7.6 million users, who require simple and affordable solutions. The voice and data solutions are custom-built and come at affordable prices. This is the first time that our data product range has been priced sub-300 dollars and the voice range sub-500 dollars,'' Nortel India Director (SMB) Ravi Chauhan told reporters here.

The products including a specific Business Communications Manager (BCM50) and a digital hybrid PBX supplied by Nortel's Korean JV LG-Nortel, will be available across the country through the company's distributor Ingram Micro and channel partners.

The company is focussing at having 300 channel partners with the launch and seeks to ramp up the number to 1,000 by the year-end, Mr Chauhan added.

To promote the new roll outs, the firm will do road shows in six cities including Hyderabad and Bangalore till Diwali and also engage in print and electronic advertisements, incurring one of its highest ad-spends, Mr Chauhan said without giving out further detaiils.

The company, which has a research and development centre at Bangalore, has also established a cutomer support centre in Chennai, to provide pre and post sales services.

Nortel will roll out these products in the rest of Asia later.

It earned revenues of 10.52 billion dollars for the period ending December 31, 2005, which is its fiscal, with businesses spread across 150 countries and 30,000 employees. It spent 1.9 billion dollars in R&D activities engaging 12,000 employees.

UNI CS RA PM1801