"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
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