There has been a rumor prevalent over the UCStrategies UC Summit since the first evening keynote. Mark Straton, an exec from Siemens, let slip that the OpenScape UC division might be sold and subtly hinted that Nortel might be the prospective buyer. There’s more info and a full video of the keynote from my take on the event and John Furrier’s opinion.
The big takeaway is what does this mean for Microsoft? Nortel and Microsoft have been going to market together with a pretty good story. If Nortel acquires OpenScape, which btw isn’t a hafl bad platform, they’d be in a position to go to market alone with an end to end solution leaving Microsoft without a proven voice partner which could be a serious blow to their UC strategy.
