Microsoft and Nortel top executives unveiled Wednesday the first offerings from a unified communications alliance the companies launched last July.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Nortel’s CEO and President Mike Zafirovski appeared Wednesday in New York to introduce the Innovative Communications Alliance (ICA) offerings, which combine technology from both companies to unify various forms of communications across a business.

Appearing on the NBC Studios sound stage of the comedy show "Saturday Night Live," Ballmer joked about the vagueness of the term "unified communications." He told the audience of media, company employees, customers and analysts that "it means everything and it means nothing, and it doesn't have a specific meaning to any one customer."

The best way to explain the term is to demonstrate how a single communications interface can be provided by tying communications applications that run on back-end Microsoft software -- such as e-mail, instant messaging and video-conferencing -- with Nortel telephony infrastructure, Ballmer said.

To that end, Nortel and Microsoft demonstrated how the ICA's current offering, the Converged Office, lets users make VoIP calls, send instant messages or check other users' online presence without having to toggle between applications. The integration of Microsoft Office and Microsoft Exchange Server makes this possible. The Converged Office is available for small- to medium-size businesses, but will be available to enterprises by year's end, executives said.

The companies also showed off some forthcoming offerings that will be available this year, including:

-- UC Integrated Branch, new hardware that will be available in the fourth calendar quarter of 2007 to deploy the Converged Office unification of VoIP, e-mail, instant messaging and other communications across an enterprise's remote offices;

-- Native SIP interoperability between Nortel Communication Server 1000 and Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 that will be delivered by the second quarter of 2007. This offering also will include Nortel professional services to help companies design, deploy and support the technology;

-- A combination of the Nortel Multimedia Conferencing and Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 to allow for one client experience across applications such as e-mail, voice, instant messaging, presence and audio- and video-conferencing. This offering, which customers will use on premises, will be available in the fourth quarter of 2007.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.