Unified communications will be the rage at the VoiceCon Orlando conference this week with big-name vendors such as IBM, Microsoft and Nortel announcing products and alliances while others charge in with UC products they announced last week in order to generate pre-show buzz.(See a slideshow of products to be on display at VoiceCon.)

The goal of UC is to blend all forms of real-time business communication - phone, audio and videoconferencing, instant messaging - with presence to improve productivity.

To that end the big names in video gear will throw in with Microsoft to better support the visual components of Office Communications Server (OCS), Microsoft’s UC platform.

The frenzied interest in UC by these vendors is no surprise, with IDC predicting sales of UC gear to top $17 billion in four years. (Compare unified communications products.)

Click to see: Pie chart showing interest in unified communications

Nortel, Tandberg and Polycom already had alliances with Microsoft and plan to announce upgraded interoperability with OCS, which coordinates voice, video, instant messaging, Web conferencing and presence to support more efficient business interactions.

Nortel is bringing four new products to the show, the fruits of its Innovative Communications Alliance with Microsoft. These include integration of Nortel IP PBXs, branch-office routers and audioconferencing software with Microsoft’s OCS, as well as a UC package for service providers.

For their part, Tandberg and Polycom say the results of their Microsoft alliances will be better pictures and sound when conferences are set up between their equipment and OCS. To accomplish this, both say they will license Microsoft’s real-time video and audio codecs that are used in OCS 2007 and integrate them with their products.

In Polycom’s case, this integration will develop in three phases, the first of which creates SIP interoperability between the two platforms to optimize firewall traversal. Ultimately the integration will lead to conferences that work across multiple networks and support Microsoft versions of real-time audio and video.

Tandberg is also announcing a partnership with Nortel, which plans to resell Tandberg videoconferencing and telepresence equipment. Nortel will offer it as part of an installation and maintenance service, Tandberg says.