1. Since Nortel Networks targets several markets, which sectors do you anticipate the greatest growth in?
As a global company, Nortel Networks has implemented customer contact solutions, agent –assisted and self-service, of all types in more than 100 countries. As a result, we see rapid growth in several different areas. First, geographically, India and the Philippines currently exhibit the highest growth in contact centers. From a size perspective, the small and mid-sized market segments show strong growth not only in new contact centers but in requirements for additional functionality like speech recognition or multimedia contact management. Because of the breadth of our portfolio, this presents tremendous opportunity.
2. In what directions will you be taking your contact center business?
Nortel Networks currently offers an extremely feature-rich and flexible contact center portfolio that we will continue to augment. Our objective is to provide Engaged Applications™ which help our customers enhance the relationships with their customers by changing the way they communicate – by shifting from reactive service provision to anticipating customer needs and giving them what they want, when they want it. To do so, we continue to evolve our portfolio to capitalize on newer technologies like VXML (Voice Extensible Markup Language), SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) and Web services that add the necessary anticipatory, time critical, media-adaptive and multimedia collaboration capabilities and transform the architecture into a completely open platform -independent one.
3. What do you consider some of the major obstacles Nortel Networks has to overcome in achieving success in the contact center sector?
Nortel Networks has been a global leader in the contact center market for years and today we have more than 35,000 systems installed. Thousands of companies across every industry and of every size rely upon our solutions to help their businesses profit. Our continued success depends upon understanding the changing needs of our customers and delivering solutions that help meet those needs – that help them communicate better, respond faster, manage information more effectively and strengthen customer relationships.
4. At one point, Nortel Networks was an advocate of the “best of breed” approach. However, it appears that there is more and more emphasis on multi function, multi channel systems. What is Nortel Networks current position?
Nortel Networks has always taken a balanced approach and we will continue to do so. What do I mean by this? It means we provide a broad multi-functional, multichannel portfolio with “best of breed” capabilities like advanced speech and skill-based routing. The portfolio is modular in design so customers can buy just what is needed today, in capability and capacity, and when business needs change they can easily add functionality or grow in size. These capabilities are designed to integrate easily with each other, so a seamless customer experience is maintained. Excellent examples of this approach are the ability to add speech recognition to current touchtone IVR applications or to empower call centers by adding multimedia contact management for e-mail, chat and so on. One benefit of this approach is that it offers investment protection to our customers.
Additionally, the customer contact portfolio is open and standards-based where possible, so we can offer more options to our customers to create just the right solution for them. We work with partners who deliver specialized applications like work force management or quality monitoring and these solutions are certified compatible.
5. Like many other technology companies, Nortel Networks has gone through some very difficult times? What steps have been taken to address this situation? When does Nortel Networks expect to achieve consistent profitability?
The telecommunications industry as a whole has certainly had a turbulent ride over the last few years. As the general manager of Enterprise Applications for Nortel Networks, I'm not in a position to characterize Nortel Networks financial information, but would refer you to Doug Beatty, Nortel Networks chief financial officer to address these questions.
6. Is Nortel actively pursuing an acquisition strategy? If so, in what areas can we expect activity?
Nortel Networks evaluates acquisitions where they make sense. I'm sure you can appreciate that the company does not preannounce such initiatives and we are not prepared to make any announcements at this time.