At an event in Rockefeller Center, Microsoft and Nortel outlined
their unified communications roadmaps and announced the release of
several products to their companies' joint portfolios.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Nortel CEO and President Mike
Zafirovski said the companies are teaming up to release the Unified
Communications Integrated Branch, Unified Messaging and
Conferencing.
Microsoft and Nortel originally joined forces in July 2006 and
formed the Innovative Communications Alliance to encourage
enterprises to make the transition to VoIP and unified
communications.
"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," Zafirovski said.
Ballmer and Zafirovski explained that the new solutions,
designed to maximize business communications, could provide a
simplified user experience and improve employee productivity by
incorporating voice, email, instant messaging and multimedia
conferencing into one application.
Specifically, the new products introduced include:
- A conferencing solution that will be a part of Microsoft Office
Communicator 2007, with features similar to Nortel's Multimedia
Conferencing
- A SIP-based interoperability between Microsoft Exchange Server
2007 Unified Messaging and Nortel's Communication Server 1000,
designed to ease customer deployments
- A Unified Communications Integrated Branch, which will combine
Nortel and Microsoft technology into one piece of hardware.
Intended to service remote offices, it is expected to provide
cost-effective, high-quality, easy-to-deploy VoIP and unified
communications.
Citing a study by Harris Interactive Services Bureau, Ballmer
added: "The average employee gets more than 50 messages every day
on up to seven different devices or applications. Software can and
will help address the ongoing challenge of managing communications
and ... 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."