Economist Group Updates Network Infrastruture

The Economist Group, the leading source of analysis on international business and related world affairs, dramatically reduces communications costs through convergence. As the media industry continues to evolve, advances in IT have taken center stage and organizations such as The Economist Group attempt to keep network infrastructure up to date.

In the face of growing network issues that took up the time and resources of the IT department, the company decided to make change. The challenge was to enable a seamless migration from legacy TDM-based telephony to a fully converged voice and data network. Having made this decision, The Economist Group evaluated a variety of converged telephony platforms. The company was most impressed with Nortel, a recognized leader in delivering communications capabilities.

Nortel provided The Economist Group with a core networked based on the Nortel Ethernet Routing Switch 8600. The applications and solutions provided IP telephony, edge connectivity, wireless access points, and wireless connectivity for voice and data. The implementation of the Nortel converged voice and data network was a great success. Thanks to the ease of management provided changes were swift and many benefits resulted, such as:

• Lower Costs: through cost-effective converged network, reducing maintenance costs and simplifying management
• Improved Mobility: through voice over WLAN, softphones and unified messaging, giving users unprecedented freedom
• Flexible communications- thanks to the ability to unlock advanced functionality in future
• Enhanced value from IT- as the high-availability network enables staff to focus on value- added IT projects