Nortel, IBM to establish joint development centre

Stan Beer
Monday, 23 May 2005 05:50

IT Industry - Development

Telecommunications vendor Nortel and IBM have signed an agreement to establish a joint development centre to collaborate on the design and development of new products and services.

According to the joint announcement, personnel from both companies will work together to enhance and extend current products, drawing from various divisions within Nortel and IBM, to drive new revenue growth while reducing R&D costs.

The first joint development project will be a new class of blade servers -  bringing together IBM's server technology and Nortel's carrier-grade communications expertise.  The new blade servers will be designed to meet the specific and demanding data flow, reliability and security needs required by the network equipment marketplace embracing next generation network solutions.
 
Nortel expects to use IBM engineering and technical services, for a number of projects, all aimed at broadening Nortel end-to-end broadband, VoIP, multimedia services and applications and wireless broadband offerings.

'Nortel is a company with a strong history of innovation. Together, we are working to reduce complexity and cost of service delivery while enabling innovation for a new set of on-demand services. This is at the core of what we do,' said Bill Zeitler, senior vice president and group executive, IBM systems and technology group.

'This agreement with IBM is a critical component of our strategy to partner for growth,' said Bill Owens, vice chairman and chief executive officer, Nortel. 'Working with IBM, as one of their key partners, is a bold step forward in our efforts to transform our business by reaching an entirely new level of R&D collaboration while reducing our R&D costs, introducing products at a faster pace and serving a broad range of customers more rapidly.'