Microsoft and Nortel provide update to the partnership
Today in New York Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer and Nortel’s Mike Zafirovski provided an update of the of their partnership, originally announced in July.
The full Webcast and transcript is available at http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/exec/steve/2007/01-17Nortel.mspx, but the key announcements are as follows:
- Integration between Microsoft’s recently released Exchange Unified Messaging and Nortel’s IP-PBXs
- Extending the combination of Nortel’s Converged Office, which integrates with Microsoft Live Communications Server and Nortel CS1000 IP-PBX, to now be available upon CS2000. This takes the solution from the small and medium enterprise, to the larger enterprise
- Integration of Nortel’s Multimedia Conferencing and Microsoft Office Communication Server
- Creation of a solution targeted for deployment within a branch office.
This announcement has been highly anticipated, as the original announcement in July was very weak on actual details. With this update, Microsoft and Nortel have shown that they have made progress over the last months that provide real solutions and value to the end user.
Though there is some time before these solutions become available, the discussion clearly shows the benefits of migrating from “old telecom” to “new IP technologies”. In this case, the ability to have a single unified client (Microsoft Office Communicator) shows real value.
Technorati Tags: Nortel, Microsoft, Unified Messaging, Unified Communications, VoIP
