With friends like Microsoft, does Cisco need enemies?

Cisco's rival Foundry Networks will partner its way into the unified communications market with Microsoft, the company said on Tuesday. Or, to be more specific, Foundry will be targeting enterprise customers by pitching a "best of breed" approach to UC that features its hardware, with technology from Microsoft, Mitel and Sun Microsystems layered on top, Foundary said.

The complete UC setup will use a Foundry BigIron RX backbone Layer 2/3 switch, ServerIron application delivery switch, and FastIron Power over Ethernet (PoE) Layer 2/3 switch. This will connect to a Sun Microsystems Sun Ray virtual display client powered by the Mitel Communications Suite and will use Microsoft's Office Communications Server 2007 and Network Access Protection (NAP).

The setup is being demoed at Interop this week, Foundry says.

It is easy to guess how Cisco might feel about the pairing up of Foundry with Microsoft, especially when some analysts are saying that Cisco and Microsoft are in a neck-and-neck battle to dominate the young UC market. But wonder what Microsoft's "special" network gear partner, Nortel, thinks of it all?

Well, despite the close tie Nortel has with Microsoft -deep access to Microsoft's OCS code and all - Nortel isn't resting its hooks only on OCS. Microsoft Subnet blogger Alex Lewis reports that Nortel this week announced the CS500 IP PBX. It's an open source IP PBX, no less, based on the SIPFoundry SipXecs project. It's less expensive than other Nortel offerings, yet includes most of the integration features that enterprises have on their UC must-have lists, Lewis says. It will integrate with OCS, of course, but it will also support IBM's SameTime.

Now, Cisco needs to pair up with IBM's SameTime to make the circle complete. But wait, they already announced that union, about a year ago. At VoiceCon Spring in March 2007, Cisco and IBM said they would support each other's UC products and do a bit of cross selling to boot.

So, who is competing and who is collaborating? When it comes to unified communications, the market is more unified than the technology.

More from Cisco Subnet:
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• Cisco
• Alex Lewis
• Foundary BigIron
• foundry networks
• Microsoft
• Microsoft’s Office Communications Serverr
• Mitel
• SIPFoundry
• Sun MicroSystems
• Sun Ray
• UC
• unified communications