The typical white collar worker handles more than 50 messages via seven devices or applications each day, a complicated situation that Microsoft and Nortel plan to alleviate with their recently announced alliance, which will provide "Innovative Communications" for business applications users across a range of industries.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Nortel CEO and President Mike Zafirovski added product details, including a specific timeline, to the program at a joint press conference in New York City recently. Called the Innovative Communications Alliance, the effort is based on a shared vision for unified communications that combines Nortel's networking and telecom expertise with Microsoft software to break down device- and network-centric communication silos. The partnership includes voice telephony, e-mail, and video conferencing technologies, and aims to enable faster and more efficient interfaces among people, as well as between people and applications.
"I'm sure [competitors] will pop a screen when a phone call comes in, but that's different than really getting intelligence in the client ... and getting unification across a variety of IT experiences," Ballmer said.
The overarching goal of the Microsoft/Nortel alliance is to transform the way business users communicate by accelerating the move toward voice-over-IP (VoIP) technology. The companies' plan includes three joint product announcements and 11 VoIP-related services from Nortel, as well as the opening of more than 20 technology demonstration centers throughout North America, Europe, and Asia.
The first product on the roadmap, due during the second quarter of this year, is a unified messaging solution involving interoperability between Nortel's Communication Server 1000 and the Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. A second product, slated for the fourth quarter of this year, adds Nortel's Multimedia Conferencing features to Microsoft Office Communicator to enable a consistent experience across voice applications, instant messaging, and audio and video conferencing. The key functionality is "presence," which is the ability to determine whether your recipient is physically available.
The third product to come from the alliance, also due in the fourth quarter and called the UC Integrated Branch, will marry Nortel routing, switching, and VoIP capabilities to Microsoft technology in one box for each of an enterprise's remote offices.
Ballmer said he believed that unified communications will lead to the ultimate goal of delivering an experience in which the end user need not distinguish between various forms of communication. He described the current environment of business communications as segmented, consisting of disparate silos of both applications and hardware.
The Microsoft-Nortel roadmap for 2007-2009 calls for the use of "smart, unified" hardware clients on the front end, while existing PBX telephony and other infrastructure on the back end remain separate. Beyond 2010 the alliance foresees a "transformation" phase in which the next logical step is an integrated back-end environment at the server level.
At the January press conference, Ballmer touched on the ways that integrated business communications can be applied to common enterprise applications such as ERP, CRM, and supply chain functions by utilizing the same development platform that is used for the communications infrastructure. Web services and a service-oriented architecture, he explained, will allow for the use of an existing development platform for integrating such line-of-business functions instead of requiring something new or unfamiliar.
"Even more powerful things happen at the upper layers in terms of the kinds of applications that can be developed," Ballmer said. "We have one platform, not only common against e-mail, IM, voice, [and] video, but also a common development platform against CRM, ERP, customer billing, call centers; you name the application, there's one way to build [it]."
Microsoft lead product manager Liz Tassey told Managing Automation that presence capabilities could enhance enterprise applications by, for example, enabling an ERP user to interact in real time with an SAP expert. Support would be available with one click, escalating a request from an instant message to a voice call, if necessary. Interactive voice capabilities, Tassey says, also could enhance common applications such as warehouse inventory monitoring, whereby an operator could communicate directly with the supporting data center.
When asked what differentiates the Microsoft/Nortel unified communications plan from similar announcements such as those from IBM and Avaya, Ballmer again pointed to the notion of a consistent development platform (either Java or .NET) for the entire business communication infrastructure. He also aligned the new Microsoft/Nortel solutions with the Windows experience, with a similar open and programmable environment, he said. Finally, Ballmer claimed that the Microsoft/Nortel products will deliver a level of intelligence within applications unmatched by competitors, such as displaying presence in an Excel document.
Zafirovski said that, compared with competitors, the Microsoft/Nortel alliance has provided a "real roadmap" for its vision of unified communications, with specific dates for product releases, as well as a plan for 2008-2010 and beyond. "Quite a few of the announcements or analyst reports over the last six months have called this 'chartware' or 'marketecture,' and what you see here today is a true integration of capabilities along with completely new services."
This article originally appeared in the March 2007 issue of Managing Automation.