News

Nortel, Microsoft Add to Joint Unified Communications Line

• By Becky Nagel
• March 12, 2008

The products are part of the companies' Innovative Communications Alliance, which now offers 10 products jointly developed by both companies, the announcement said.

The four new offerings are:

• Nortel Converged Office for Communication Server 1000: Integrates Microsoft's Live Communications Server 2005 and Office Communication Server 2007 with two versions of Nortel's telephony server: 1000 IP-PBX and CS 2100 IP-PBX.
• Nortel Multimedia Conferencing 5.0 for Office Communications Server 2007: "Reservationless audio conferencing solution" with "dial in audio bridge capabilities."
• Nortel and Microsoft Carrier Hosted Unified Communications Solution: Allows service provider to host UC solutions via Nortel's Communication Server 2000, Exchange Server 2007 and Office Communications Server 2007.
• UC Integrated Branch: Remote administration offering with WAN routing, Ethernet switching and "Toll-quality" voice over IP (VoIP) through Office Communications Server 2007 and Nortel's Secure Series Router 4143.

"With these solutions, enterprises can now choose to deploy unified communications via a customer premise solution, managed service solution, or hybrid of the two, helping accelerate the pace of unified communications adoption," Ruchi Prasad, vice president and general manager, Innovative Communications Alliance, Nortel, said in a press release announcing the products.

According to the companies, these releases mean the partnership has now delivered on all the products it originally promised when it was announced in January 2007. Both companies intend to continue to work together on new UC solutions.

"In the coming year, we will extend the scope of our unified communications collaboration to include areas such as Contact Center integration and a mix of hybrid and fully hosted UC solutions," commented Gurdeep Singh Pall, corporate vice president, Unified Communications Group, Microsoft, in the same release.