Three news items today: the global availability of Nortel's Business Communications Manager 450, Sylantro's support of Amazon Web Services' Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for its Synergy platform, and the merger between the IMS and NGN forums.

Nortel's BCM 450, which became globally available on Oct. 14, is targeted at midsize businesses with up to 300 employees and is designed to speed customer’s transition from legacy digital equipment, says Nortel. The company estimates that BCM 450 “enables firms to save up to 70% of their original investment by reusing existing equipment.” In addition to hundreds of standard telephony features, BCM 450 includes unified messaging, message forwarding (available in one to two months), meet-me conferencing, computer telephony integration, intelligent contact center functionality, and SIP compliance.

Sylantro Systems, a provider of multiplay application feature servers for converged communication applications, last week announced compatibility of its Synergy platform with Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). The compatibility makes Sylantro’s voice and Web applications available in a cloud computing environment on the Amazon pay-as-you-go hosted computing service. According to Sylantro, the cloud based offering can be used by service providers for hosting developer sandboxes, try-and-buy services, full blown hosted services, or as an alternative disaster recovery site while minimizing the significant CAPEX, procurement, and deployment barriers associated with launching new IP communication services.

Also last week, The IMS Forum and the NGN Forum merged to form the IMS/NGN Forum. The partnership is designed to create, test and deliver NGN services, according to the joint statement. In a prepared statement, Michael Khalilian, chairman and president of the IMS/NGN Forum said: “This partnership enables our members to fully address the emergence of a single market comprised of information technology, telecommunications, and media sectors that formerly operated in separate markets.” In addition, the IMS/NGN Forum announced that it had created what it claims to be the industry’s first joint venture capital study group consisting of its members and over 20 venture capitalists, private equity groups and financial institutions. The IMS/NGN Forum will continue to support plugfest interoperability tests, launch a number of technical and business working groups, and will continue to provide marketing, education and advisory services.

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