Last July, Microsoft and Nortel announced a strategic partnership in order to develop innovative methods of business communication by focusing on integrating voice, e-mail, instant messaging, multimedia conferencing and other forms of communication.
Today, the companies jointly unveiled a road map for 2007, which included plans for a unified desktop and soft phone for VoIP, e-mail, and instant messaging, as well as the Nortel Communication Server 2100, large scale telephony hardware which can support up to 200,000 users on a single system.
Microsoft and Nortel also rolled out three new solutions geared at helping businesses make the transition to VoIP and unified communications:
UC Integrated Branch. This new product from the alliance will incorporate Nortel and Microsoft technology on a single piece of hardware that delivers cost-effective, high-quality and easy-to-deploy VoIP and unified communications in remote offices. The UC Integrated Branch is planned to be available in the fourth quarter of 2007.
Unified Messaging. To simplify customer deployments, native session initiation protocol (SIP) interoperability between the Nortel Communication Server 1000 and Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Unified Messaging is planned to be available in the second quarter of 2007. The solution includes Nortel professional services for design, deployment and support.
Conferencing. This new solution will extend the rich feature set of Nortel Multimedia Conferencing to Microsoft Office Communicator 2007, delivering a single, familiar client experience consistent across applications such as voice, instant messaging, presence, and audio- and videoconferencing. The on-premise solution is planned to be available in the fourth quarter of 2007.
"We are executing forcefully on the vision of this alliance and have made tremendous progress," said Mike Zafirovski, Nortel CEO and President.
"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."
"The average employee gets more than 50 messages every day1 on up to seven different devices or applications," added Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.
"Software can and will help address the ongoing challenge of managing communications and this challenge is the driving idea behind our alliance with Nortel. Together, we will evolve VoIP and unified communications to integrate all the ways we contact each other in a simple environment, using a single identity across phones, PCs and other devices."
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