Nortel, Microsoft chart unified communications progress

Even though they fleshed out their joint strategy on the stage of “Saturday Night Live” a year ago, Nortel and Microsoft have since shown that their unified communications partnership is no joke.

Indeed, they appear to be making significant progress in their Innovative Communications Alliance (ICA). The companies say they have:

* Lined up 500 joint ICA customers, an increase from 300 last fall.
* Opened up two collaboration centers in Raleigh, N.C., and in Maidenhead, United Kingdom, which have been visited by 1,100 customers.
* Built 16 Microsoft technology centers in the last year equipped with live ICA demonstrations.
* Established 150 ICA demonstration centers around the world, more than seven times as many as they had a year ago.
* Has been recognized by market tracker Gartner as a unified communications leader in its “Magic Quadrant” grid of vendor and product positioning.

The companies formed ICA 18 months ago to jointly develop products combining Nortel’s voice technology with Microsoft’s application expertise for a unified communications market worth $26.5 billion last year and expected to near $50 billion by 2012, according to In-Stat and Wainhouse Research. Six months later, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Nortel CEO Mike Zafirovski updated reporters and analysts with a road map of where they planned to take ICA and what they planned to release in 2007 and 2008.

Click to see: A rundown of the first batch of jointly developed unified communications offerings from the pair:

Offerings announced at that time included converged office, integrated branch, Session Initiation Protocol interoperability between Nortel’s Communications Server 1000 and Microsoft’s Exchange Server 2007, and integration between Nortel’s Multimedia Conferencing 5.0 system and Microsoft’s Office Communicator 2007.

“We are very much on plan and delivering the products, which were outlined by the CEOs,” says Ruchi Prasad, Nortel vice president and general manager for ICA.

General availability of more ICA products is expected to be announced next month at the VON Conference & Expo in San Jose.

The ICA alliance is viewed as a deep relationship heavy on joint development and product consolidation vs. more superficial multivendor interoperability and integration strategies favored by Cisco, IBM and others. For example, Nortel and Cisco recently agreed to integrate IBM’s Lotus Sametime software into their unified communications products but those are looser agreements of support rather than combined development of new products.

The vision of Cisco, which last year bought Web conferencing company WebEx in a multibillion-dollar deal, is that the network should be the nerve center of a unified communications setup.

Nortel and Microsoft argue that ICA differs from other unified communications initiatives in that it leverages the ubiquity of Microsoft's enterprise desktop and server software, enhanced with 100-plus years of telecom expertise form Nortel.

For Nortel, ICA is key to the company’s increasing reliance on software and services for future growth. ICA sales have been a contributor to its enterprise division realizing four consecutive quarters of double digit year-over-year growth, Prasad says. Customers are buying Nortel CS 1000 platforms — the company’s IP PBX — integration licenses, services, applications, and data products across the enterprise portfolio, she says.