Nortel Pumps UC for SMBs with IBM

Nortel is adding its IP telephony applications to IBM's new generation of Power System processors, expanding its reach into the small to medium business space. The announcement expands upon Nortel's relationship with IBM and its continuing efforts to promote unified communications; the company has a big UC relationship with Microsoft.

The joint offerings are being targeted at SMBs and branch offices with 30 to more than 500 employees and feature Nortel's open source telephony capabilities and IBM Lotus Sametime, Notes, and Domino collaboration capabilities including CRM, point-of-sale, email, and calendaring on a single IBM platform. Nortel's UC software is based upon SIP and the solution allows users to customize their communications experiences to their preferences on whatever device they choose.

IBM gets the benefit of being able to integrate Nortel's Software Communication System onto its new line of servers, providing an integrated growth path for its current IBM System i and System p clients.  The Power Systems boast advanced energy management features, support for multiple flavors of Unix including Linux, and a single platform for its system integrators using i, UNIX, or Linux servers.

For more:
- Nortel's release can be found here.
- IBM's new server release is here.

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Nortel welcomes Microsoft's OCS.