With much fanfare, and the requisite loud introductory music, the Innovative Communications Alliance — which is the Microsoft/Nortel Unified Communications initiative announced back in July, 2006 — the two companies held a press conference to announce some new developments.
The event had the production values of bona fide television show, which should not be all that startling considering it took place in the cozy confines of Studio 8H in Rockefeller Plaza, — the studio where Saturday Night Live is taped — with an estimated 150–200 media, analysts, and customers in attendance.
The crowd gathered to hear Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer and Nortel’s CEO Mike Zafirovski, together with the first high-profile customer of the unified communications solution, Johan Krebbers, Group IT Architect & Advisor of the Shell CIO Council of Royal Dutch Shell.
According to Ballmer, “The average employee gets over 50 messages a day across up to seven different devices or applications. 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.”
“We are executing forcefully on the vision of this alliance and have made tremendous progress,” Zafirovski added. “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.”
Among the salient points of the briefing:
The Innovative Communications Alliance announced the first three concrete deliverable solutions and spoke of a roadmap for the future. Among the products announced:
UC Integrated Branch: Microsoft’s Ballmer discussed this standalone hardware product that will incorporate both Nortel and Microsoft technology to deliver VoIP and unified communications to remote offices. Currently, expected availability of the product is in late 2007.
Unified Messaging: Zafirovsky explained that there would be native SIP interoperability between Nortel Communications Server 1000 and Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, and that this would be readily available by the second quarter of 2007.
Conferencing: Nortel’s CEO further explained that this offering would expand Nortel’s multimedia conferencing solution to integrate with Microsoft Office Communicator Server 2007, thus delivering a single familiar client experience across voice, IM, presence and audio/video conferencing. Expected availability: Fourth quarter of 2007.
Joining the two CEOs onstage was Shell’s Johan Krebbers. “Innovative communications and collaboration technologies are critical to fully enabling Royal Dutch Shell’s global work force, and key to operating at top quartile in our industry. We believe in and support the vision Nortel and Microsoft have outlined,” said Krebbers, when describing why the multinational selected this solution.
As a customer with 112,000 employees in over 130 countries, Royal Dutch Shell is truly an example of a company with a global operational environment. Krebbers explained that for his firm, large projects obviously benefit from — indeed depend on — virtual teaming.
“One of our greatest challenges,” Krebbers said, “is the need to access to unique experts whenever and wherever they may be.”
Krebbers and his team were impressed by the solution’s ability to enable a unified user interface with a choice of collaboration solutions that makes employees accessible anywhere. Shell plans to consolidate their global data centers, to a scant three locations, and will deploy Nortel’s Communication Server 1000 and Microsoft’s Office Communications Server and Exchange to make this a reality.
New locations will be hosted from the central data centers, while existing sites will migrate to the centralized solution when the currently deployed local PBX requires a major upgrade or is written off (end-of-lifed).
The audience was treated to a brief demo of the solution as well showcasing some of the solution’s promise.
Also announced were the implementation of and the deployment of over 20 joint demonstration centers worldwide, with a roadmap that included the opening of up to 80 more such demo centers bringing the total to 100 by mid 2007.
The two CEOs spoke of some of the early successes of the alliance, including dozens of new customers, in markets as diverse as heavy industry (oil, etc…) and education. They also proudly pointed to hundreds more customers) in the pipeline.
The news is certainly exciting for an enterprise market that’s been waiting for Unified Communications for over 10 years, but in this editor’s humble opinion, much of the story at yesterday’s briefing has got to be more about he marketing aspect and less about the pure technology. Presence is not new. A unified inbox is not new. Integration with a PBX or IP PBX is not new…
What is new, and perhaps what is the greatest strength of this alliance is the sheer muscle that is now being applied to the promotion and implementation of a first-class unified communications solution. Microsoft knows the enterprise desktop and Nortel knows communications. It’s my belief that having two of the strongest, most well-known companies partnering on this type of solution might finally help push Unified Communications into the mainstream.
Those of you who have been around long enough know that we’ve been on the cusp of “The Year of Unified Messaging (later Unified Communications)” every year since about 1995. I’m not going to take the bait and name 2007 as “the year” but I certainly believe that the strength and capabilities of these two market giants and their combined ability to make this technology accessible to more people will go a long way towards making it a reality.
