Nortel has unveiled plans to be the first to market the industry's broadest portfolio of unified communications (UC) solutions and applications built around Microsoft's new Office Communications Server 2007 and Office Communicator 2007.

These new solutions enable people to connect, communicate and collaborate seamlessly to improve business performance. As the only IP-PBX manufacturer currently testing with Microsoft's development team, Nortel and Microsoft are already successfully trialing these unified communications solutions with customers around the world, said a Nortel official.

"Nortel and Microsoft share a common vision that business communications are evolving to software, enabling enterprises to more simply and effectively integrate communications with business processes," said president, Enterprise Solutions, Nortel, Joel Hackney.

"With solutions that span VoIP, branch office, conferencing, IP phones, data networking and integration services, Nortel is providing enterprises with the industry's most complete portfolio of unified communications solutions to enhance their Microsoft OCS experience," he added.

As part of a joint road map affirmed by Nortel CEO Mike Zafirovski and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in January 2007, Nortel expects to be first in the industry to offer customers software-based "native" interoperability between its IP-PBX portfolio and Office Communications Server 2007, ultimately delivering richer functionality with less complexity and operations costs.

In a separate incident, Nortel and Dell unveiled an agreement to provide Dell's North American customers with complete unified communications solutions leveraging Nortel's entire Enterprise Solutions portfolio including solutions from the Nortel and Microsoft's Innovative Communications Alliance, as well as a suite of related services.

Additionally, Dell and Nortel have established joint product-development initiatives.
Gartner Inc, the world's leading information technology research and advisory company, has positioned Nortel in the Leaders quadrant in the '2007 Unified Communications Magic Quadrant' report. - TradeArabia News Service