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Both companies now intend to bring forth the fruits of this unique partnership titled the Innovative Communications Alliance (ICA) globally. The agreement involves joint efforts on R&D, go-to-market as well as services.
The onus of bringing the products to Asia falls on Philip Goldie, Nortel Microsoft (ICA) leader.
Priya Padmanabhan of CyberMedia News spoke to Goldie and Sukhvinder Ahuja, Nortel Microsoft Business Leader India, on the implications of the alliance and the market focus.
What is Nortel’s Unified Communications story post the alliance with Microsoft?
Philip Goldie: Under our innovative Communication alliance, our products, like the CS 1000, are coupled with Microsoft technologies like Live Communications server and MS Exchange email systems. We are working now on how to bring all these solutions together. It is pretty radical in terms of the overall market landscape. For the first time, in the field of Unified Communication, you have two leading vendors coming together to bring a clear strategy, a clear joint roadmap and also selling jointly. It has been well received by customers, partners, media and analysts. We are very excited about it
Microsoft has relationships with other UC vendors as well. How exclusive is this partnership?
Goldie: Yes, they have relationships with other vendors. In the sense of working together, it is by no means exclusive. But in the sense of having a formalized alliance, we are investing together in three areas.
One is in research and development. We have a Nortel team based at the Redmond campus working on joint solutions, integrating existing products and working on new products
The second is in services. Nortel is investing heavily into building service delivery capabilities and bringing together technologies like Microsoft’s application oriented solutions with IP telephony and voice technologies. We are putting together services options that will be available to customers either directly or existing channel partners. So the channel ecosystem can now come to Nortel to get the expertise it needs for solutions. Some of the services offered are on how to use the networks; move voice on to the data infrastructure; LAN audits to test the networks and user solutions that integrate the IP telephony platform and Live Communication Server.
How are you interacting with the channel ecosystem to take the new offerings forward?
Goldie: We are enabling channels in integrating the two sets of products. Eventually, as the relationship progresses, we expect the channels to do it on their own. We expect the solution sets to improve for customers in the next few years. We have partners who are also developing solution sets.
 Some of the channel partners in the Indian market are starting make acquisitions. For example, Wipro bought out 3D Networks, which does Nortel based services. That is a good example of a traditional application development company buying over a company specializing in voice communication.
That transformation is happening. We can help the partners by providing them the missing elements in the capabilities.
How would this alliance help differentiate Nortel in the UC market vis-à-vis other competitors like Cisco and Juniper?
Goldie: The intrinsic operating system level capability that Microsoft brings is the best that can be delivered for customers. This is something transformative for business. We have the best presence capabilities in the market. Other vendors are still confused about this. They are still pursuing different presence options.
In terms of integration of our products, we are very focused on providing a clear R&D roadmap. Deployment simplicity is important. Other products in the market require third party gateway, which is very complex because the customer has to maintain three different types of infrastructure. We are working on making sure the inter-working between the products is good. We have a clear joint roadmap to use SIP to glue all these together.
Microsoft have themselves gone on record saying that they have not undertaken this level of depth in R&D with vendors. They have done that with Intel and AMD. Nortel is the third company after them. That public testament of what is going on in Redmond, Ottawa and other centers is really unique.
Very aggressive timeline and drive to move the UC space forward. We believe that we are building a relationship with Microsoft at various levels and that will give us success. We want to be the default choice for UC.
Are you looking at bringing out industry specific UC solutions?
Goldie: We are working on industry specific applications for telecom and BPO. In call center markets like India and Philippines we have announced the integration of the UC capabilities into our contact center solutions. We have other vertical solutions on the radar that will be brought to market. We are working with LG in Korea to build a UC specific desktop phone. We are also looking at devices for heath care and nursing, where a lot of features need to be changed. We think in the BPO space, UC will have a significant impact because the key driver in this space is about doing workflow and business process quickly and efficiently.
Do you plan to do include more software into your traditional hardware devices?
Goldie: Nortel is mostly into hardware. In the latest release, there is a lot of software enablement on the Nortel side. For example, making the SIP interface to interact with the Microsoft application. We have also publicly announced our intention as a PBX vendor to move our platform to software architecture.
We will move to software more and more. Our Contact center 6 is already a pure software product.
How is the customer momentum building in Asia on the UC front since the alliance was announced?
Goldie: The Microsoft-Nortel alliance was signed on 18th July 2006. In Asia, we kicked off the campaign in September and in India, it was in January. We have appointed 12 people in APAC to focus on the Nortel-MS alliance. We recently won a deal in Singapore with International SOS. Globally, Shell is also a global customer. We are talking to many customers. We are in the first phase of joint selling with Microsoft.
What are your plans to tap the market in India?
Sukhvinder Ahuja: We discuss with the Microsoft sales team and to understand their go-to-market strategy to align it with ours. We felt that people in the enterprise segment across many verticals would be the key early adopters. Enterprises in verticals like healthcare and manufacturing are the early adopters for these technologies. They are already in a hybrid stage having migrated from a TDM to a hybrid network. We can work in a hybrid network-TDM+IP network. Our technology is not about replacement of existing networks.
The momentum in India is exciting. It has just been a few months since the alliance took off in India. Customers are keen on this and we get a “wow” reaction. In the next few months, we hope to close in on a couple of wins verticals like hospitality and government, and then look at the mass enterprise market.
What does the joint product roadmap look like?
Goldie: We already have an offering called the Converged Office that is available today. This pairs Live Communications with IP Communication from Nortel. The second solution that will be out in Q2 is another IP telephony-Exchange 2007 product. In Q4-two more new solutions- CS 1000 with Office Communication Server, and a unified conferencing solution, will combine Nortel Multimedia Conferencing with Microsoft's Office Communicator 2007. By the first half of 2008, the UC Integrated Branch, will link VoIP functionality with Microsoft's communications tools for deployment on a single server.
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