Microsoft and Nortel have announced that 430,000
licenses have been issued for their range of jointly
developedunified communications(UC) products
since its launch last year. According to Gartner, this is
indicative of enterprise seeing increased value in usingunified communications.
"UC products matured significantly during the past 12 months and
by the end of 2007, 80%of enterprise communications purchase
decisions will require support for unified communications," said
Bern Elliot, vice-presidnet at Gartner.
Elliot said that initially, justifying unified communications
was still difficult since it spanned different technology, market
and application areas. In pursuing a UC strategy, enterprises were
still worried that they could end up with disparate applications
operating over their networks.
By
Microsoft and Nortel teaming up to develop a common
communication architecture for enterprise, this has helped provide
some users with a standard platform to integrate into their
existing IP networks.
The companies came together last year to migrate traditional
PBX phone systems
onto a software-based IP platform. This combines Microsoft's
unified communications software platform and Nortel's own software
products.
Microsoft and Nortel said that a software-centric approach to
phone systems would enable businesses to reduce the total cost of
ownership and will allow the creation of new applications and
services faster.
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