Nortel CEO and President Mike Zafirovski (left) and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer (right) announced the first fruits of the alliance between the two companies that has been inked in July 2006. The CEO pair also presented a common road map for voice over Internet protocol and unified business communications solutions.

"We are executing forcefully on the vision of this alliance and have made tremendous progress," Zafirovski said. "We completed the planning stages and are now delivering unified communications solutions to businesses around the world. Our goal is to close the gap between the devices we use to communicate and the business applications we use to run our businesses, giving employees the power to use information more quickly and effectively."

"The average employee gets more than 50 messages every day on up to seven different devices or applications," Ballmer added. "Software can and will help address the ongoing challenge of managing communications and this challenge is the driving idea behind our alliance with Nortel. Together, we will evolve VoIP and unified communications to integrate all the ways we contact each other in a simple environment, using a single identity across phones, PCs and other devices."

As the core of the Innovative Communications Alliance's vision, Microsoft and Nortel will make the UC Integrated Branch available in the last quarter of 2007. The UC Integrated Branch is designed to streamline the transition to voice over Internet protocol (VOIP) and unified communications.

"To simplify customer deployments, native session initiation protocol (SIP) interoperability between the Nortel Communication Server 1000 and Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Unified Messaging is planned to be available in the second quarter of 2007. The solution includes Nortel professional services for design, deployment and support," revealed Microsoft.

Voice, instant messaging, presence, and audio- and videoconferencing will be part of an on-premise solution scheduled for availability in the fourth quarter of 2007, via the integration of Nortel Multimedia Conferencing with Microsoft Office Communicator 2007.