NEW YORK – Nortel Networks Corp. and Microsoft Corp. outlined a joint road map today to deliver their shared vision for unified communications.
The road map, the product of an alliance between Microsoft and Nortel announced in July 2006, includes three new joint solutions to improve business communications by breaking down the barriers between voice, e-mail, instant messaging, multimedia conferencing and other forms of communication.
Speaking at an event in New York in front of about 100 customers along with reporters and analysts, Microsoft Corp. CEO Steve Ballmer and Nortel CEO and president Mike Zafirovski outlined how companies can improve employee productivity and effectiveness and reduce the costs and complexity of communications.
They also announced 11 new implementation services from Nortel and the opening of more than 20 joint demonstration centers where customers can experience the technology firsthand.
In the six months since the alliance was formed, the two companies have signed agreements with dozens of customers, Nortel said in a statement, and have developed a pipeline of hundreds of prospects interested in the benefits of unified communications.
“We are executing forcefully on the vision of this alliance and have made tremendous progress,” said Zafirovski in a press release. “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 day on up to seven different devices or applications,” Ballmer added. “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.”
Microsoft and Nortel said they’ve formed the Innovative Communications Alliance to help companies transform business communications by speeding up the transition to voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) and unified communications.
The three solutions introduced today include:
UC Integrated Branch: This new product will incorporate Nortel and Microsoft technology on a single piece of hardware to deliver VoIP and unified communications in remote offices by 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.
Conferencing: This solution will extend Nortel Multimedia Conferencing to Microsoft Office Communicator 2007, delivering a single client experience across applications such as voice, instant messaging, presence, and audio and video conferencing. It will be available in the fourth quarter of 2007.
In 2007, the companies also plan to extend their current unified communications solution – a unified desktop and soft phone for VOIP, e-mail, instant messaging and presence – to the Nortel Communication Server 2100.
In addition, Nortel and Microsoft presented a road map for 2008 and beyond for moving business communications onto a software platform designed to drive a higher-quality user experience and reduce total cost of ownership.
The companies also announced they have equipped more than 20 joint demonstration centers in North America, Europe and Asia, with more than 100 additional centers scheduled to open by mid-year.
At the same time, Nortel announced it has added 11 core integration services to help customers build, deploy and support joint unified communications solutions, including end-to-end project management.
Nortel already has more than 2,200 VOIP experts to deliver these services and will add more as deployment ramps up, the company said. This group is supported by the 10,000-strong Nortel global services team and a large network of services partners.
