Microsoft, Nortel Jump Into the Enterprise VoIP Market
Posted on January 29, 2007 By: Mike, VoIP Facts: The Blog email author
Filed Under VoIP News
About six months ago, Microsoft announced a joint partnership with Nortel to focus on the development of a series of products aimed at merging the VoIP and communications services of the two companies. In mid January came more details of the venture, indicating a serious attempt by Microsoft to break into the fast emerging market of VoIP for business.
Aimed to compete with high end providers such as Cisco and Avaya, the four year Innovative Communications Alliance aims to share intellectual property, research and development, sales and support teams of the companies.
Later this month, the companies plan to ship its debut product, the United Communications Integrated Branch, a branch office appliance integrating Nortel routing, firewall, and IP PBX technologies with Microsoft’s Office Communicator Server 2007 (OCS).
The companies are also working on full SIP compatibility between Exchange Server 2007 Unified Communications server and the Nortel IP PBX Communication Server 1000.
Nortel is also planning to boost its enterprise IP PBX platform this year to a capacity of 200,000 users with the CS2000 series, up from 10.000 available with the CS1000.
The trend in the VoIP enterprise community has been to go to Linux or UNIX based systems, meeting stringent requirements of 99.999% availability. The Windows Server and Exchange Server 2007’s new clustering abilities, along with ongoing R&D with Nortel concerning system resiliency should meet users reliability and up time requirements, according to Anoop Gupta, corporate VP of Microsoft’s unified communications group.
The four year plan is an ambitious one. First introducing small unified clients linking Microsoft messaging with Nortel hard and soft phones, followed by a transformation of the back end, and then going from separate server and PBX environments, to one unified platform utilizing Intel architecture, with common Windows software, development, and management tools.
VoIP, Microsoft VoIP, IP Telephony, Internet Telephony
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