Enterprise infrastructure suppliers timed several announcements last week to coincide with Interop 2007 held in Las Vegas. Today, we’d like to highlight news from Avaya and Nortel.

Avaya announced a new IP telephony system called Avaya Distributed Office, extending its portfolio to serve small and midsize businesses that must meet the challenges of multiple locations. The SIP-based system can come preconfigured from the factory to make branch locations easier to provision, be centrally managed, and support flexible media and trunking architectures.

Avaya is offering two alternative hardware and software packages to support the 40-person office with the Avaya Distributed Office i40, and 120 users with the Avaya Distributed Office i120. The system comes with built-in voicemail, automated attendant, wireless support and it can support IP, digital, wireless, and soft phones. It will be generally available from Avaya sales channels on May 29.

Nortel announced a portfolio of hosted communication products called Nortel Hosted Solutions, which include IP telephony, unified communications, automatic call distribution (ACD), contact centers and other network application services. Specifically, the packaged applications are based on Nortel’s Communication Server 2000, Unified Messaging 2000, and Multimedia Communication Server 5200.

Nortel, which has a solid track record of remotely managing networks and network equipment, will host and manage these applications from centers in Research Triangle Park, N.C., and Istanbul, Turkey; another center is scheduled to open later this year in Frankfurt, Germany. The centers support both enterprise customers directly and supplement network operations centers in support of Tier 1 service providers.

Next time: More news from Interop 2007.

Steve Taylor is president of Distributed Networking Associates and publisher/editor-in-chief of Webtorials. Larry Hettick is a principal analyst at Current Analysis.