Microsoft Unified Communications & RTC User Group, United Kingdom

"Nortel and Microsoft Form Strategic Alliance to Accelerate Transformation of Business Communications - Shared vision for unified communications to drive new growth opportunities for both companies."

PressPass item here ... Zoom in on the photo and you can see a nice chunk of plywood lying on the floor. Looks like a bit of a hasty set-up so it'll be interesting to see if this is more than PR noise... GigaOM commentary here.

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Mike Jones
Technical Consultant - Compass Hill

In retrospect, it is now clear why there was so little content on RTC at TechEd this year in Boston plus it looks like the Nortel/MS link up wasn't ready for prime time until after the June UC analyst/press event three weeks ago.

I think this alliance is significant but it's more like reading the heads on the Kremlin wall than fact.  Steve Balmer mentioned he was paying for Nortel IP. We don't know how much IP, whether it's hard cash, how much cash or whether it's quid pro quo. Also he likened this to the DEC alliance in the early days, which if I recall correctly, resulted in sorely needed services capability around messaging, Exchange and the accelerated demise of All In 1.  Plus he wasn't coy about a question about future alliances. Whereas MS' telephony alliances have centred around interoperability, this is about knowledge transfer, joint development, linking up their sales teams and enabling Nortel's service people to support the deliverables.  It's key to MS delivering scalable, rich UC in the enterprise and to change the rules of the game on IP PBX's.  If MS can control desktop presence, then they have a better chance of leap frogging Avaya and Cisco, but they need Nortel's call management experience and their relationships with telephony managers. But that's a long game.   Meanwhile Asterix is nipping at telephony's ankles.

 

Like the Kremlin annalogy. I think it's an v interesitng announcement from all sorts of views. I wonder what Siemens make of it given thier prominence at the UC launhc the other week. It will bring more compettition for Cisco which can only be good, akthough I feel somewhat sorry for Mitel although the situaiton they now find themselves in was entirely predictable. as for Asterix I've had dealings with various groups trying to turn this into a repeatable business but none have found a way to do it so far. time will as it will for the MSFT / Nortel relaitonship.

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Russ Kirk
russ.kirk@GreyConvergence.no.spam.com