Nortel Fleshes Out Unified Communications Vision

Nortel Networks at VoiceCon on March 5 will back up its unified communications vision with a series of new and enhanced products aimed at both enterprises and carriers.

Nortel will extend its unified communications vision beyond the work it is doing with Microsoft in their joint Innovative Communications Alliance to integrate IBM’s Lotus Notes with its Multimedia Communication Server 5100 Unified Communications platform.

Nortel developed a multimedia client for Lotus Notes that works with the MCS 5100 to deliver functions such as “click through calling, e-mail and calendaring,” along with voice messaging and conferencing, according to Tony Rybczynski, director of strategic enterprise technology at Nortel in Ottawa.

The new release of the MCS 5100 also simplifies collaboration to allow users to access voice, video, conferencing, e-mail, instant messaging and presence features with a few mouse clicks.

As part of Nortel’s effort to focus on software and services, moving away from a proprietary hardware-based platform, the new MCS 5100 can be implemented on IBM servers running Linux, and Nortel opened up the platform with new APIs to allow third-party developers to create “communications-enabled business processes,” said Rybczynski.

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