Nortel Government Solutions

CPI has partnered with Nortel for almost twenty-six years: successfully and consistently engineering Government communication infrastructures around the world.

So... Why is it important for your government agency to look into new technology?

In the backdrop of tight IT spending, it is now more critical for state and local government CIOs and IT leaders to tightly align their IT agenda with that of the business priorities of government. That agenda in turn is bringing with it a rethinking of government business practices. For instance, the traditional model of the agency-by-agency approach to IT that leaves a legacy of duplicate applications and technologies is becoming more difficult to sustain. In addition, government IT organizations have been hampered by job reductions and changing skill set requirements for e-Government applications and other new technology programs – all of which add more pressure to these groups. And finally, there is a pressing need to improve the quality and speed of decision-making by improving interoperable voice communications and sharing of governmental information, especially in public safety and homeland security areas. All these trends point to governments beginning to embrace a new technology strategy going forward. These strategies include looking at centralization and consolidation of IT and telecommunications to drive costs down, to deliver service consistency and to improve networking performance to serve new mission-critical applications across the government enterprise. This is happening at a time where many government networks cannot meet growing demands, and the legacy technologies or services are becoming increasingly uneconomical to support. As a result, governments are beginning to look at transforming their networking environment to exploit the power of the converged government enterprise, where governments can work more efficiently than ever before at lower cost. This all translates into delivering higher-quality government services to citizens, businesses, and communities. 


Transforming government networks

To address these challenges, the transformation of the government network must deliver more than just lowering the cost of ownership over current methods. First, government business must now be supported seamlessly, no longer hampered by the boundaries of physical location or single means of contact. There must be a consistency of communications services across government that will enable high-quality government interactions with citizens and businesses that are easy, natural, convenient and productive no matter where and when they wish to be served. Second, as the adoption of eGovernment and the notion of an always-on government, 7 x 24 takes hold; IT networking and services will be a mission-critical element of running government for voice, data and multimedia applications. Government solutions must therefore possess a foundation that is built with proven mission-critical security and reliability. Third, a transformed government network can benefit in a single, efficient, easy-to-manage network versus the traditional separate approaches we see today. It will pave the way to address new emerging demands and applications in government by driving the need for high-performance networking, where bandwidth bottlenecks are eliminated, open standards-based implementations are embraced, governments’ investments are future proofed, and where possible, leverage the use of existing networking assets.

Delivering upon these requirements will position governments with a common approach to improve communications with all stakeholders while helping improve employee productivity and reducing overall total costs of ownerships.


Applications of a converged government enterprise

A converged government enterprise can be applied in many settings of government entities. Applications can be seen for state, provincial and local governments, public safety, policy, state agencies and Departments of Transportation to name a few. At a high level, each of these representative government organizations can see these following benefits:

State and local governments: Convergence creates more open and accessible government services while strengthening the performance and dependability of communications.

Public Safety: Convergence helps government public safety agencies to provide seamless communications: voice, data and video among public safety personnel and with their command centers. It speeds incident response, sharing of information and improves the quality and speed of decision-making.

Policy: Police organizations deploying convergence solution can improve the reliability of their communications and support a capability of rapidly mobilizing top-notch communications at an incident response site.

Department of Transportation: A convergence solution extends a consistent set of communication services state-wide, allowing remote locations to effectively use and operate with a set of voice and data services that are equally available in the higher-end government facilities. Rapid deployment and lower cost of ownership can be achieved.


Nortel’s role in enabling the converged government enterprise

Nortel is an industry leader and innovator focused on transforming how the world communicates and exchanges information. The company’s solutions form the foundation of many federal, state, provincial and local government voice and data networks. For the Government industry, Nortel offers a four-part vision that empowers governments. They are:

    1. Improving how governments communications and collaborate 
    2. Improving how governments serve citizens, businesses and communities 
    3. Protecting government information assets, critical infrastructure and key assets 
    4. Keeping governments running


Nortel’s Government Convergence solutions provides the IP multimedia networking foundation for supporting multimedia applications that can improve government communications and support employee collaboration, which help drive improved productivity. Convergence is also more than voice over IP; it is the delivery of voice, video, data and applications over one network—wired or wireless. Furthermore, convergence empowers government remote and mobile workers to be as ‘present’ in the workplace as their colleagues in the larger government complexes, supporting the notion of “virtual enterprise.” Nortel’s Government Convergence solution offers unprecedented flexibility in building a communications network that seamlessly combines traditional and IP-based telephony, along with uncompromised resiliency, security and performance at a lower cost of ownership level compared to competing solutions. This solution is built with proven Nortel Products supporting: 

    • World-class, features-rich business telephony features 
    • Applications like IP Contact Centers, Unified Messaging, SIP-based collaborative communications applications and video 
    • High-Availability converged network infrastructure underpinned with industry-leading network security and management

Government Convergence solutions benefits 

Government entities can realize benefits in many areas of business:

    • For government employees… Converged applications and mobility solutions grant them customized control over when, where and how they can be reached, no matter where they are or how they access the network – eliminating the communications barriers that inhibit business flow. 
    • For citizens, businesses and communities… Converged multimedia applications seamlessly blend government service agents and web capabilities with voice communications – melding various customer touch-points into one proactive, intelligent system that can anticipate customer wants and needs, and deliver time-critical information to them via any method they prefer. 
    • For the government IT Organization… Converging onto an easy-to-manage IP infrastructure dramatically reduces costs. You don’t have to overhaul your current infrastructure to reap those benefits; just empower it with IP, and migrate from hybrid to pure-IP on your own timetable. Our solution enables this migration. 
    • For Governments as a whole… Convergence helps governments improve how they communicate and collaborate. Governments can customize interactions, unify the organization, accelerate responses to the stakeholders and sped and improve the quality of decisions. Convergence creates the “virtual enterprise” – a strategic asset that enables remote and mobile government workers to be as ‘present’ in the workplace as their colleagues in the main government offices.

Nortel’s unique advantages

Nortel offers to government the following unique strengths that have give many government entities the peace of mind that they have the very best solution possible. They are: 

    • Complete end-to-end solution: Nortel’s breadth of products and solutions provides for every aspect of convergence at an outstanding value. 
    • Nortel is a trusted leader in communication technology with a proven history of delivering some of the highest levels of reliability in the industry – this being 99.999 percent (“five 9’s”) reliability. 
    • Nortel’s “Security in the DNA” philosophy ensures that security is built into the solution from the ground up, and not as an after-thought. 
    • Certified and award-winning convergence solutions – for example, Nortel was the first vendor to achieve end-to-end Voice over IP solution U.S. Department of Defense Joint Interoperability Test Command (JITC) certification. 
    • Investment protection philosophy does not force a fork-lift upgrade to take advantage of applications such as IP Telephony and multimedia collaborative communications. 
    • Solutions that encompass both traditional and IP Telephony ensure a smooth migration path and investment Protection.

A case for convergence

Based on the experience from Nortel customers’ converged network deployments, our customers have reported operational savings of 10 to 30 percent from converging networks, leveraging IP Telephony and distributing agents among regional, remote and teleworkers over their previous environment. In addition, a study from and independent research and consulting group has also revealed that a customer deploying a Nortel IP Telephony solution could realize more than a 50 percent savings compared to competitive offering when doing a like-for-like Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) comparison.