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Nortel IP for Turkey's Ford Otosan
By DAVID SIMS
TMCnet CRM Alert Columnist
Ford Otosan, one of the largest automobile manufacturers in Turkey, has converged its voice and data communications across three manufacturing locations with IP-based technologies from Nortel.
The firm is based in Istanbul. As in, here. This reporter lived in Istanbul as a journalist in the mid-90s, moved back here over the weekend and is falling in love all over with this place. Most fascinating, diverse and livable big city in the world.
The new network gives Ford Otosan a secure, high-speed infrastructure supporting its manufacturing functions, ranging from design and production to business processes and including internal communication tools for employees such as IP telephony, e-mail and video conferencing.
Ford Otosan credits the network infrastructure with its ability to increase manufacturing productivity and employee efficiency. Company officials say the network enables 24/7 production “due to its redundant design across all sites.”
The Ford Otosan comes as good news for a Nortel trying to recover from accounting scandals and management instability. They've gotten some good news, as a recent report pegs them as leading in the global IP PBX market.
“Nortel leads the recovering North American IP PBX market,” said Matthias Machowinski, directing analyst at Infonetics Research, in a statement, calling Avaya and Cisco "engaged in an epic battle" for second place, with Cisco gaining on Avaya.
The overall market totaled $2.1 billion in the third quarter, an increase of 17 percent over a year ago and seven percent from Q2. In its Enterprise Telephony report on IP PBX, Infonetics said market growth is fueled by the widespread move to VoIP and by an improving economy.
Ford Otosan's network was deployed by Koc Sistem and Merpa, two partners of Nortel Netas, Nortel's subsidiary in Turkey. Ford Otosan has three major locations in Turkey -- the manufacturing facility in Kocaeli, spare parts warehouse in Kartal and cargo truck plant in Eskisehir. The new network serves approximately 2,500 users.
Ford Otosan's new distributed backbone infrastructure includes an independently operated and redundant PBX system to take over and re-route any communication in the network in case of an emergency. The network includes Nortel Ethernet Routing Switch 8600, Ethernet Switch 470, and Communication Server 1000M, as well as CallPilot unified messaging system.
Ford Otosan's been in operation since 1959, and has 15 percent of the Turkish automotive market share obtained in 2004. Koc Sistem is the largest and the oldest domestically-capitalized information technology company in Turkey.
David Sims is contributing editor for TMCnet. For more articles please visit David Sims' columnist page.
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