Nortel has been on a gallop recently to build partnerships with the big players, IBM and Microsoft to deliver enhanced unified communication functionality with the Enterprise players.
Nortel formally announced its plans to bring it’s telephony software to IBM’s Systems I (AS/400 for those of us who’ve been around for a few years). System I has its own virtualization technology built in at the hypervisor level so now you can have a single physical machine running your CRM application, your corporate database, and now your IP PBX for small organizations of up to 100 users. IBM has had a similar relationship for some time with 3Com on the Systems I for organization of 100 to 1000 users while Global Services has recommended Cisco’s CallManager for more than 1000 users
Nortel is one of a number of vendors getting on the Service Oriented Architecture band wagon. Where or not anything comes of this, as it has not yet, remains to be seen….
