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FAQs

What incentives do you have in place to allow enterprises to migrate from Nortel to Clearspan?
Aastra is providing Nortel customers a special offer on migration to our Clearspan® Unified Communications platform. Clearspan provides a smooth migration path which allows enterprises to gain many of the benefits of Unified Communications today, while migrating at their own pace to the complete solution. In order to help enterprises with the financial costs associated with migration, Aastra is offering the following:

• All SIP integration trunks between Clearspan and the existing Nortel systems are provided at no cost (unlimited number of trunks)
• Significant savings on all Aastra 67xi phones, for up to 1500 phones
• Free instructor-led training for administrators during the first year of deployment (up to 2 students per class)
• Free end user, web based training for an unlimited number of users during the first two years of deployment

What options do you provide to allow Nortel customers to migrate to your platform over time without a major forklift upgrade?
Clearspan provides immediate productivity without immediate replacement through Self-Paced Migration™; a unique approach to VoIP migration that provides Unified Communications capabilities to enterprise users without replacing their existing systems until the time is right for that enterprise.

Self-Paced Migration is based on a four stage migration strategy, customized for an enterprise’s unique requirements and schedule:

• In the first stage Clearspan is implemented as an overlay to existing systems and provides services to teleworkers, small branches and road warriors. It also provides a unified dial plan for inter-site dialing transparency and Unified Communications features such as desktop integration, unified messaging, conferencing and fixed mobile convergence regardless of a user’s current PBX system.
• The second phase includes VoIP migration of sites with obsolete systems as these will yield significant productivity improvements as well as important cost reductions and business continuity improvements.
• The third phase continues the migration with the next set of highest priority sites as defined by the customers overall migration plan.
• The final phase consists of migration of the largest and/or lower priority sites to complete the migration.

A Self-Paced Migration™ can take place over weeks, months or even years depending on the urgency, priority and funding for the project. The important thing is that all users in the enterprise can realize productivity and performance gains immediately while the investment in VoIP phones and networks proceeds at a pace most effective for the enterprise as a whole.
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What are the main advantages of migrating over time to a new system?
The main advantages of a Self-Paced Migration™ strategy are:

• Enterprises can immediately save on operational costs by deploying SIP Trunking, and managing the trunks and calls between enterprises using the Clearspan solution
• Enterprises can defer a significant portion of the capital costs associated with a new communications system such as the cost of new phones or individual user licenses for users whose primary phone remains on the legacy system
• Enterprises can gain immediate benefits by deploying Unified Communications features across the enterprise.

What productivity enhancing features can users benefit from with Clearspan as an overlay to their existing system?
During migration, all users can immediately benefit from the following features:

• All users can share a single, company wide unified dialing plan
• All users can share a single conferencing and collaboration system
• All users can share a common, centralized unified messaging system
• Find Me/Follow Me – allows users to have a single virtual number
• Fixed Mobile Convergence – allows for the seamless integration of mobile phones with the enterprise communications system
• Outlook/browser toolbars – gives users the flexibility to manage features and calls from their desktop
• Gives remote workers all the features and functions as if they were in the office
• Support for Microsoft® OCS™ or IBM® Sametime™ functions.

Besides these incentives, what are the main advantages of Clearspan over competing solutions?
Clearspan has many clear advantages over competing solutions. Here are just a few of them:

• Clearspan is a carrier-grade solution with five 9’s reliability, and superior ability to scale to well over 100,000 users
• Clearspan was built from the ground up as a pure SIP solution
• Clearspan’s centralized architecture provides capital and operational savings over hardware centric solutions
• Clearspan provides a complete Unified Communication platform with Unified Messaging, Conferencing and Collaboration, Fixed Mobile Convergence, Desktop Integration and Contact Center functionality built in
• Clearspan provides extensive APIs allowing easy integration with business processes and existing enterprise applications; in addition enterprises can benefit from the large community of third party developers who have already provided value-added business applications on top of Clearspan
• Even without the financial incentives offered here, Clearspan is already one of the lowest cost solutions available today, both in terms of initial costs and ongoing total cost of ownership.

Do you offer any management tools or services for customers who are in a multi-vendor configuration during transition?
As a standards-based solution, Clearspan supports standard management tools utilizing SNMP. A SNMP management tool is included at no cost and customers can also easily integrate Clearspan into larger SNMP management environments where applications such as IBM Tivoli® or HP Openview® are used.

We also provide the following provisioning tools:

• Template Builder: Manages SIP endpoint templates for fast and easy user and phone deployments.
• Bulk Provisioner: Allows mass provisioning/de-provisioning of users. For Nortel systems, Aastra can import an Excel® spreadsheet, quickly provisioning up to 10,000 users in one hour.
• Auto Discovery: Provides plug-and-play capability for any Aastra SIP endpoint, dramatically reducing the time for move, add and change functions.

Is there a minimum or maximum enterprise size associated with this offer?
Clearspan is ideally suitable for large enterprises, with 1500 or more users across the entire enterprise. It can easily scale to over 100,000 users on a single system. This offer provides an unlimited number of free SIP integration trunks and a 40% discount on up to 1500 phones. For larger deployments, additional discounts may be available. Contact your sales representative for more information.
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Is this offer available if I have a mixed vendor network, or if I am migrating from a non-Nortel platform?
The Clearspan Self-Paced Migration solution works well for integrating and migrating from multi-vendor networks and applies to mixed networks. Similar incentives may also be available when migrating from non-Nortel platforms; contact your sales representative for more information.
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In your opinion, how much longer can customers remain on the Nortel platform and still provide reliable service to their users?
This depends on several factors such as the type and age of the Nortel platform, growth or other changes in the topology of the enterprise customer, etc. However, given the uncertainty of what will become of the Nortel portfolio, current customers would be well advised to move to a provider with strong financials, and a proven history of providing portfolio support and options for smooth transition to a new solution. And, the sooner an enterprise migrates, the sooner they can begin enjoying the benefits of Unified Communications.
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Are there any regional restrictions on this offer?
This offer is restricted to enterprises that are based in North America. However the solution can be deployed to service users anywhere around the globe.
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How or where can we get more information?
Contact us now to find out more about Clearspan and this special offer.
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