The trial will involve the Nortel Agile Communication Environment (ACE), which aims to combine communications and applications by integrating services such as click-to-call, instant messaging and presence technologies into the most widely-used business applications.
HSBC will also be using dial-by-name, click-to-video, click-to-conference and other applications available on desktops, laptops, Blackberry devices and mobile phones. It is hoped the system will enable management teams to work together more efficiently.
It will also improve mobile working at the company by implementing hot desking, home working and travel working, which was one of HSBC’s key requirements of the service.
Tim Cureton, group head of telecommunications, HSBC, said: “It’s increasingly important to be able to use the skills and talents of a corporation’s worldwide management team as a single, united resource. Our unified communications solution is aimed at joining-up the decision-makers within our company globally and placing the control and convenience of their personalised communications environment in their hands.”
Nortel says its unified communications portfolio can deliver return on investment of up to 178% with 30% savings on mobile communications.
“Orientating voice, video and text communications around the user – and not as it was with the user around the technology – is key to operating as one HSBC and increasing our competitive advantage on a transnational scale,” said Cureton.
“Because the HSBC unified communications solution enables presence capabilities, users can see immediately if a person they need to contact is available and be able to click-to-call from the desktop. The solution enables these capabilities directly from business applications, so that a person can determine, for example, who provided information on a spreadsheet, find out if that person is available and be able to contact them instantly via a mouse click. The solution also determines how best to reach that person, be it via IM, telephone, videoconference or email,” said Richard Tworek, general manager of SOA at Nortel.
