Nortel, Microsoft Sketch Unified Communications Road Map

Six months after Microsoft and Nortel Networks announced an alliance to jointly tackle unified communications opportunities, the companies are rolling out a road map of products blending audio, video and software technology.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Nortel CEO Mike Zafirovski shared the stage at a New York press conference Wednesday to unveil the fruits of their partnership. "One of the things I'm most excited about is the breadth of this relationship," Ballmer said. "We're the only companies whose road map really talks about this notion of the smart, unified client."

Tying together multiple technologies for deployment on a single server to simplify administration is one of the alliance's goals. UC Integrated Branch, a new product scheduled for release at the end of 2007, will link VoIP functionality with Microsoft's communications tools for deployment on a single server. Another planned offering, a unified conferencing solution, will combine Nortel Multimedia Conferencing with Microsoft's Office Communicator 2007.

Deeper integration of Microsoft's software with Nortel's telephony products throughout the vendors' portfolios is a pillar of the partnership, which Microsoft and Nortel are calling the Innovative Communications Alliance (ICA). Key customers like Royal Dutch Shell contributed to the alliance's formation by urging the companies to work together, according to Ruchi Prasad, Nortel's ICA general manager.

Listening to the customers is apparently paying off. Johan Krebbers, an IT architect at Royal Dutch Shell, took the stage at the event to describe how his 11,000-employee company is gradually replacing its heterogeneous communications infrastructure with one built entirely around a Microsoft/Nortel unified communications system.

Microsoft and Nortel have opened 27 joint demonstration centers in North America, Europe and Asia to tout their unified wares, with 100 more centers scheduled to open by the middle of this year. The demo centers are used only for direct-sales pitches, but executives said partners are participating in proof-of-concept workshops at two ICA Collaboration Centers, one in Raleigh, N.C., and one in Maidenhead, U.K., near London.

"We're going to be leveraging very extensively our ecosystem of partners," Zafirovski said.

Though Nortel executives frequently invoked references to the partner channel, the company is also looking to grab a big chunk of the unified communications services business for itself.

"Today, 20 percent of our revenue is through services. We think that number should be significantly bigger," Zafirovski said.

Still, the two vendors said all of the products touched by the ICA deal will be available through their VAR channels. A handful of systems integrators are in both Nortel's and Microsoft's partner programs. For partners with expertise on one side of the aisle but not the other, the vendors said they want to facilitate training opportunities and partnerships.

"We have definitely seen the partner channel say, 'Hey, this telephony and conferencing is a big deal. Can you connect us to the Nortel team?' " said Janice Kapner, Microsoft's director of unified communications marketing. "We want to bridge that gap. The teams on both sides are working very closely together. Today's really the milestone. Now that we've announced what we're doing, we think the interest will pick up even more."

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