Microsoft, Nortel show off their unified comms

The CEOs of Microsoft and Nortel Networks have announced the first set of products stemming from an alliance of the companies formed in July.

At a press conference in New York, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Nortel CEO Mike Zafirovski also gave customers and analysts a glimpse of their future product road map.

The partnership between Nortel, one of the largest makers of telephone infrastructure equipment in the world, and software behemoth Microsoft is designed to help corporate customers transition their old telephone networks to networks based on the internet protocol (IP). When the partnership was announced, the companies promised to integrate the Nortel telephony technology with Microsoft's Office software, and to build new products that incorporate both companies' technologies.

On Wednesday, they introduced the Unified Messaging solution, which is expected to ship in the second quarter of 2007. It ties together Nortel's Communication Server 1000 and Microsoft's Exchange Server 2007 using the IP telephony standard session initiation protocol, or SIP. The tight integration should simplify installation and maintenance of the messaging application, the executives said.

In the fourth quarter, the companies will integrate Nortel's Multimedia Conferencing product with Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 to deliver a single client experience for voice, instant messaging, presence, and audio and videoconferencing. This means users could check the online status of recipients in an Outlook email. And instead of sending an email response, they could initiate an IM conversation or videoconference using the same client.

Ballmer said: "The first phase of integration is about pulling together communications to form a fully integrated client. And eventually we'll go to transformation, where we'll fully integrate the back-end systems for collaboration and communications management."

The first product that will actually integrate Microsoft and Nortel technology to form a single piece of hardware is the Unified Communication Branch. It will go to market in the fourth quarter of this year. Because the new device incorporates technology from Nortel and Microsoft, it eliminates the need for corporate customers to deploy a separate gateway or routing product to link the communications network with the Microsoft Office applications.

John Roese, Nortel's chief technology officer, said in an interview that the Microsoft relationship has already helped his company increase sales of its telephony products, which for the past few years have placed third in terms of overall market share. The companies claim they've already signed up dozens of customers, including multinational oil company Royal Dutch Shell.

Ultimately, Microsoft and Nortel expect an even deeper level of integration for their products.

Ballmer said: "Presence information could show up in the comments on an Excel spreadsheet. That's how deeply we think we need to get with the integration."

Marguerite Reardon writes for CNET News.com