Nortel and Microsoft Partner for 'Unified Communications'

Published: July 19, 2006

by Alex Woodie

Microsoft and Nortel yesterday unveiled a new partnership to jointly develop, market, sell, and service a so-called "unified communications" stack of software that brings together e-mail, voice mail, voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) call processing, instant messaging, and video.

In a press conference yesterday, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer shared his views on how software is changing how people communicate. "This industry is at a real inflection point, and change is imminent," he said. "I predict that within just a very few years all of us will be using next-generation devices for voice and video communication."

Microsoft wants to make the software that runs those next-generation devices, but it needs the help of telecommunications experts like Nortel, which has traditionally focused manufacturing networking devices like routers and other hardware used in business environments, to make that vision a reality.

At the press conference, Mike Zafirovsky, CEO and president of Nortel, backed Microsoft's software-centric approach, and declared that the partnership would generate more than $1 billion for Nortel, which raked in $2.4 billion in revenue the past quarter. "Unified communications has offered us a tantalizing promise for some time right now, a world where computers, phone devices, and PDAs converge into a single, easy-to-use platform," he said. "And Nortel and Microsoft share this vision, and this is a giant win for our customers."

Nortel and Microsoft will form joint teams to collaborate on product development that spans enterprise, mobile, and wire line carrier solutions, said Steve Slattery, president of enterprise solutions for Nortel. "This alliance will deliver a complete software-based unified communications infrastructure that supports the widest range of user phones and devices, ensuring business-grade telephony over PSPN, IP, and mobile networks," he said.

This isn't the first partnership between Microsoft and Nortel to target unified communications. The companies previously collaborated on an interface between Microsoft's Live Communications Server (LCS) product and Nortel's CS-1000, an IP-based PBX system designed to support up to 15,000 IP clients.

The joint Nortel-Microsoft unified communication products will start rolling out in 2007, Slattery said.