The rumors are hot and heavy about the imminent sale of Nortel's Enterprise Solutions (ES). Siemens Enterprise Communications and Avaya are the top candidates to buy ES according to most reports. If ES is sold to either of the two competitors what should customers with an old, installed Nortel PBX system do? I have been personally recommending to my end user clients with aging Meridian 1 systems to upgrade to the CS 1000 platform, because most of the time it makes financial sense; it bypasses the headache of learning a new system from scratch; and, primarily, the newer system is highly competitive with anything else available on the market in design and feature/functions. A major design issue I had with the previous Meridian 1 and CS 1000 versions was nonredundant power in the stackable/standalone port carrier/media gateway chassis, but this issue has been addressed with the latest system release.One of the most important attributes of the new CS 1000 Release 6 that was not reported in my earlier post is a new media gateway board that can be configured in a Meridian 1 stackable equipment module to intelligently link it to a CS 1000 standalone control server or call processor board housed in a MG 1000. This allows for a very smooth migration between platforms. The previous migration option required a swap out of the old equipment module for the new media gateway chassis. Customers would watch an installer move the port circuit boards from one chassis to the other and wonder why Nortel did not support its very large base of Meridian 1 IPEMs? Maybe for the same reason that the original CS 1000, known as Succession 1000, did not support digital line stations: stupidity!
Regardless of where ES winds up, the latest CS 1000 release is good news for loyal Nortel product customers who have no desire to install a totally new system, but wish to upgrade their old Meridian 1. I am certain that the new owner of ES will support the Nortel installed PBX system base while slowly migrating customers to their own platform sometime down road, because they would be crazy if they didn't!
