Nortel Global Services, the telepresence arm of Nortel Networks, today inked a deal with professional services firm Deloitte to provide telepresence, video conferencing and associated multimedia services to the global organization’s 130 member firms. The open standards-based video conferencing services come in the form of managed services rather than equipment themselves – an approach the traditional infrastructure-oriented company has been pushing as it evolves into a service-centric technology provider.

“Most infrastructure vendors, regardless of what kind of infrastructure it is – IT, communications, networking – are looking very strongly at a service-centric kind of business,” said Mike Jude, senior analyst with Nemertes Research. “Infrastructure by and large is becoming a commodity, regardless of where you are, so consequently there are more points of service, margins are high and perception of service in terms of value is usually higher with users.”

As a signature account, signing up Deloitte is a notable accomplishment for Nortel and could be the start of many wins to come, Jude said. For companies the size of Deloitte, a Fortune 500 company, managed telepresence services often make more sense than a company-owned platform. With the onus entirely on Nortel, the telepresence experience is entirely controlled, and the company knows who to hold accountable if something goes astray.

“I think the notion here with a Deloitte is, what are they selling? They’re basically selling expertise, so if you are preparing to offer services like this, you don’t want to sign a deal with someone that would co-op you,” Jude said. “Going with Cisco for telepresence is kind of like becoming a minion of Cisco. They are so big and they do so many different things and have so many different experts, so where’s the play for anyone else if you do that?”
Telepresence has been gaining steam as many organizations look to circumvent rising oil prices and airfares and to reduce their carbon footprint. Nortel, in particular, has been increasing its focus on the conferencing technology by reselling Polycom and Tandberg telepresence systems and managing them from a global network of eight multimedia network operations centers (MNOCs). This managed services approach, also employed vendors like HP and Teliris, large network operators like British Telecom and Nortel competitor iFormata, means that its customers don’t have to deal with setup or maintenance of the system. Nortel’s MNOCs can connect with each other and with their clients using open video systems. The telepresence platform includes implementation, proactive network monitoring and around-the-clock support of the network and applications.