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Jan. 19, 2007

Nortel CEO Mike Zafirovski and Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer are currently planning their new joint venture that targets the business markets.

More precisely, the pair said they want to break down the barriers between voice, email, IM (instant messaging) and multimedia conferencing.

Microsoft and Nortel will be offering VoIP (Voice over IP) and unified communications systems to businesses via the ICA (Innovative Communications Alliance), the new joint venture formed by the two companies in July of last year.

Zafirovski and Ballmer said they've inked agreements with dozens of customers and have "hundreds" of prospects interested in taking advantage of unified communications.

Speaking at an event at Studio 8-H in Rockefeller Center, the two companies outlined how businesses can boost employee productivity and effectiveness, while reducing the costs and complexity of communications.

Zafirovski and Ballmer also announced eleven new implementation services from Nortel and the opening of more than twenty joint demonstration centers where customers can experience the technology firsthand.

"We are executing forcefully on the vision of this alliance and have made tremendous progress," Zafirovski said. "We completed the planning stages and are now delivering unified communications solutions to businesses around the world. Our goal is to close the gap between the devices we use to communicate and the business applications we use to run our businesses, giving employees the power to use information more quickly and effectively."

For his part, Ballmer added that average employees receive upwards of fifty messages every day on up to seven different devices or applications, and software can and will address the challenge of managing overall business communications.

"As a team, we will evolve VoIP and unified communications to integrate all the methods we contact each other, and in a simple environment, using a single identity across phones, PCs and other devices," Ballmer added.

The Microsoft-Nortel alliance's new UC Integrated Branch incorporates Nortel and Microsoft technology on a single piece of hardware to deliver VoIP and unified communications in remote offices.

The new gear will be available in the fourth quarter.

A unified messaging platform that provides interoperability between Nortel's Communication Server 1000 and Microsoft's Exchange Server 2007 is scheduled for release in the second quarter of '07.

A conferencing solution that combines the functions of Nortel's Multimedia Conferencing to Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 is set to be available in the fourth quarter.

Additionally, the two companies said they plan to extend their unified communications solution, which includes a unified desktop and soft phone for VoIP, e-mail and instant messaging, to the Nortel Communication Server 2100, a carrier-grade enterprise telephony product supporting up to 200,000 users on a single system.

Looking forward to next year and beyond, Microsoft and Nortel said they hope to move business communications onto a software platform designed to drive a higher-quality user experience and reduce total cost of ownership.

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Source: Wireless Week