BellSouth Migrating 22 Contact Centers to Nortel IP Technologies

BellSouth has announced a major migration to Nortel IP technologies in its call center operations. Here's the press release that came out today:

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BellSouth Chooses Nortel Contact Center and Speech Solutions; Migrates 22 Contact Centers to Next Gen Technology to Better Serve Customers

DALLAS --(Business Wire)-- Jan. 31, 2005 -- The telephone operating subsidiary of BellSouth Corporation (NYSE:BLS) has selected enhanced IP contact center and speech solutions from Nortel (NYSE:NT)(TSX:NT) for deployment in 22 locations across nine states. According to recent Frost & Sullivan market research, Nortel has designed and deployed over 200 speech applications for automating and improving routine business functions in more than 16 countries.

"BellSouth needed a comprehensive solution that could provide skill-based routing, e-mail, chat and other multimedia and collaboration applications," said Richard Burns, vice president - centers and operations support, BellSouth. "Nortel is able to provide this in a cost-effective manner that allows us to better serve our customers."

BellSouth is migrating to Nortel's latest Internet Protocol (IP) contact center solution to create versatile, end-to-end customer contact centers to better serve its customer base of more than 21 million access lines and 2 million DSL customers and BellSouth Long Distance, Inc.'s 6 million long-distance customers. BellSouth is also migrating its Nortel Meridian 1 solution to software version 4.0 of the Communications Server (CS 1000) IP PBX platform to provide increased scalability and flexibility, providing a choice of migration paths to an IP multimedia environment and improved customer service. Nortel's Symposium portfolio is a diverse suite of customer interaction solutions for customer contact centers.

The ability to migrate gracefully to IP is a critical capability of Nortel's IP Contact Center, enabling companies to leverage the benefits of IP Telephony without having to overhaul or purchase completely new communications infrastructures. Customers can use the Symposium Call Center Server with CS 1000 to leverage the power and performance of convergence.

"This agreement builds on Nortel's continued strong relationship with BellSouth," said Roxann Swanson, vice president and general manager, enterprise multimedia applications, Nortel. "For more than 22 years, BellSouth has deployed Nortel solutions spanning voice and data products."

The award-winning Symposium suite enables businesses to take advantage of powerful capabilities like skill-based routing, comprehensive management and reporting, and real-time displays to enhance the human experience, resulting in stronger, more profitable relationships.

About BellSouth

BellSouth Corporation is a Fortune 100 communications company headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia and a parent company of Cingular Wireless, the nation's second largest wireless voice and data provider.

Backed by award winning customer service, BellSouth offers the most comprehensive and innovative package of voice and data services available in the market. Through BellSouth Answers(R), residential and small business customers can bundle their local and long distance service with dial up and high speed DSL Internet access, satellite television and Cingular(R) Wireless service. For businesses, BellSouth provides secure, reliable local and long distance voice and data networking solutions. BellSouth also offers online and directory advertising through BellSouth(R) RealPages.com(R) and The Real Yellow Pages(R).

More information about BellSouth can be found at www.bellsouth.com.

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. Serving both service provider and enterprise customers, Nortel delivers innovative technology solutions encompassing end-to-end broadband, Voice over IP, multimedia services and applications, and wireless broadband designed to help people solve the world's greatest challenges. 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.