Nortel, Microsoft unveil first fruit of collaboration

The chief executive officers of Nortel Networks and Microsoft shared a stage in New York Wednesday to unveil the first fruits of the broad partnership they announced six months ago aimed at enterprises. They also described what lies ahead for the duo.

In the current phase of their partnership to meet enterprise communication needs--which starts this year and continues through 2009--Microsoft and Nortel will endeavor to essentially combine PBXs with server software functionality, using Microsoft’s Office Communications Server and Nortel’s Feature Server--running on Intel servers and programmed with Microsoft Windows tools--to satisfy all of a corporate customer’s telephony needs.

The two companies introduced three new offerings this week resulting from their joint product development efforts over the past six months. The first, available in the second quarter, is a combination of Nortel’s PBX with the newest unified messaging capabilities of Microsoft’s Exchange Server. The second, available in this year’s fourth quarter, is a combination of Nortel’s Multimedia Conferencing product with Microsoft’s Office Communications Server. And the third, unified integrated branching, combines routing, switching and voice over IP--along with the Exchange Server capabilities--into a single device.

Microsoft Product Manager Paul Duffy demonstrated the Multimedia Conferencing/Office Communicator combination by responding to an e-mail with an instant message (after having been notified of the other party’s availability) and then shifting the IM conversation to a multi-party audio/video conference.

He went on to demonstrate how he could interact with the Exchange server--including voicemail, e-mail and calendar--via a regular phone call. An automated voice told him, “You have a meeting that you organized from 11:30 to 1:00 in New York, titled ‘customer meeting.’” The voice offered a list of options including canceling the meeting and sending an “I’ll be late message,” which he did, even specifying how late he’d be, using voice commands.

In the second half of this year, Nortel will also upgrade its CS1000 PBX--which it sells to small and medium businesses in combination with Microsoft servers--for large enterprises. The upgraded version, the CS2000 series, will combine instant messaging, presence, telephony and Office and Exchange Server functions.

“Over the last 12 months, we've put a significant emphasis on small and medium-sized businesses,” Nortel CEO Mike Zafirovski said. “The converged office has been a terrific way to upgrade small and medium-sized businesses from the old solutions to an IP, voice-over-IP solution. That has been getting great traction. Although we've [also] been focusing on large enterprises, we've not done a very good job driving global accounts. We are preparing…to both go after the large multinationals as well as become much more relevant [to] small and medium-sized businesses.”

Some time after this year, Microsoft hopes to integrate Nortel’s Multimedia Contact Center with its own Office Communications Server. “This stuff can get pulled together so that, however your customers want to contact you, there's one integrated agent workstation inside the call center,” Ballmer said.

He also hinted at a new 360-degree videoconferencing device Microsoft plans to introduce later this year.

Further down the road, Microsoft and Nortel plan to integrate their back-end management systems, allowing developers to create applications for the system. “We really then do have one common platform, not only common against e-mail, IM, voice and video, but also a common development platform against CRM, ERP, customer billing, call center--you name the application, there's one way to build these applications,” Ballmer said.

Nortel and Microsoft will open two offices to jointly develop products: one in Raleigh, N.C., and one in London. And they currently have 20 office locations at which customers and partners can interact with the two companies’ joint venture face-to-face. By the end of July, the one-year anniversary of their collaboration, the two plan to have 100 such offices.