Microsoft and Nortel have unveiled a roadmap for
enterprises adopting unified communications platforms.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Nortel CEO Mike Zafirovski
outlined the plans at a New York event yesterday.
The roadmap is the result of an alliance between Microsoft and
Nortel announced in July 2006. It offers 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.
Zafirovski said, “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.”
Ballmer added, “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.”
The three solutions from the pair include UC Integrated Branch,
a combination of Microsoft and Nortel software run on a single
piece of hardware to deliver “cost-effective, high-quality and
easy-to-deploy VoIP and unified communications in remote
offices”.
Microsoft and Nortel plan to make UC Integrated Branch available
in the fourth quarter of this year.
In addition, the pair's Unified Messaging solution sees close
integration between the Nortel Communication Server 1000 and
Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 unified messaging platforms.
Unified Messaging will be available in the second quarter, and
will include Nortel professional services for design, deployment
and support.
The final piece in the jigsaw is the Conferencing solution,
which will extend the feature set of Nortel Multimedia Conferencing
to the Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 platform. This will
deliver a single, familiar client experience across applications
such as voice, instant messaging, presence, and
videoconferencing.
Conferencing is planned to be available in the fourth quarter of
2007.
More information:
Microsoft/Nortel press conference
transcript
Microsoft and Nortel team up
Cisco boosts security for unified comms
Intel and Siemens join forces on unified
comms
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