Building on their existing Innovative Communications Alliance (ICA), Nortel and Microsoft plan to offer solutions that will enable service providers to deliver unified communications services to small and medium business (SMBs) and enterprises.

Nortel and Microsoft’s alliance will allow carriers to host unified business communication and collaboration services for their business customers, including e-mail, instant messaging, VoIP, click-to-call, video conferencing and other multimedia services.

According to Richard Lowe, president, Carrier Networks, Nortel, "With these carrier solutions, we can deliver feature-rich unified communications to small and medium-sized enterprises through the carrier partners that host their voice services today. Together Nortel and Microsoft are eliminating challenges that SMBs face when sourcing professional grade communications, by stripping the burden of complexity from the enterprise back office."

Nortel will integrate its Communication Server 2000 softswitch with the Microsoft Solution for Hosted Messaging and Collaboration. Nortel will also provide a full range of convergence integration services from the Nortel Global Services portfolio that can accelerate and expedite all stages of a unified communications deployment.

With these hosted communications solutions offerings, service providers will be able to equip SMB and enterprise workers with tools such as click- to-call, as well as traditional voice communications and in/outbound dialing from their Microsoft Office Communicator desktop client.