Nortel, Microsoft lay ground for hosted services

Microsoft and Nortel Networks are extending their unified communications partnership to carrier networks, laying the groundwork for hosted services.

The companies teamed up last year as the Innovative Communications Alliance to develop technology for enterprises to combine voice calls, instant messaging, e-mail, videoconferencing, and other forms of communication. That work was aimed at providing a multimedia version of a corporate phone switch, plus including presence information to show how each employee could be reached at the moment.

On Wednesday, they are set to announce that the initiative has been expanded toward service providers, allowing the carriers to provide a richer equivalent of the Centrex services that small and medium-size businesses often use instead of buying their own phone switch. By crafting systems for carriers, the alliance for the first time is going after the market Nortel traditionally knows best. Appropriately, the announcement comes at Inform 2007, a conference for its carrier customers that Nortel is holding in Orlando, Florida, alongside the CTIA Wireless show.

The companies will pair up Nortel’s Communication Server 2000 (CS2000) softswitch — a VOIP (voice over Internet Protocol) version of a carrier phone switch — with Microsoft’s Solution for Hosted Messaging and Collaboration (HMC) software. The combination will allow service providers to host Exchange, Sharepoint and Office Live Communications Server for their customers, said Sita Lowman, a product marketing manager in Nortel’s Converged Multimedia Networks business. The primary customers would be businesses with between 50 and 200 phone lines, she said.

Networking vendors are gearing up to grab a piece of unified communications, though the technology is still in its infancy. Some IT managers who want to deploy unified communications have found the technical challenges daunting.

In addition to supplying the softswitch, Nortel will offer the carriers integration services to get the system up and running, Lowman said.

While the hosted services would appeal primarily to smaller businesses, the technology behind it is aimed at large Tier 1 carriers, Lowman said. Nortel and Microsoft will start trials with one European and one U.S. carrier in the second half of the year, and the offering is expected to be available by the end of the year.