IBM, Nortel Expand Reseller Pact

Nortel Networks said it has expanded its reseller agreement with IBM Corp.’s Global Services division. The move lets IBM Global Services sell Nortel’s end-to-end optical networking solutions for cost-effective management of value-added, high bandwidth applications to enterprises and carriers worldwide.

IBM is already a “Nortel Networks Global Solutions Partner.” Now, Big Blue has added Nortel Networks OPTera Metro 3500, 5200 and 5300 Multiservice Platforms; Nortel Networks Alteon Web switches; and Nortel Networks Shasta 5000 Broadband Service Node (BSN) to its comprehensive solution set.

IBM Global Services will provide end-to-end support for these products, including consulting, implementation, and post-sale support, for enterprise customers worldwide, officials said.

“This next step in our relationship with IBM allows us to build integrated communications solutions that leverage Nortel Networks optical expertise and IBM’s eBusiness leadership,” said Peter Evans, Metro Optical Solutions, Nortel Networks, in a statement. “Together, we are positioning our service provider and enterprise customers for new levels of profitability, and reducing the metropolitan networking bottleneck to make cost-effective services a reality.”

“Nortel Networks OPTera Metro DWDM (dense wavelength division multiplexing) products… provide a key underpinning to our GDPS (Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex) environment,” said Rich Lechner, vice president, marketing, IBM eServer zSeries.

The expanded reseller agreement extends a relationship between the two companies involving the IBM Fiber Saver 2029, which was built by Nortel Networks for IBM in 1999. Fiber Saver 2029 was the first enterprise-ready optical connectivity solution designed to provide mainframe customers with high-speed, reliable data transfer at low cost. It is a key component of IBM’s GDPS environment, which provides exceptional application availability and near-transparent disaster recovery across multiple data centers over a metropolitan area network.