About: Alliance Background

Nortel and Microsoft established the Innovative Communications Alliance to help our customers realize the significant business benefits associated with unified communications. The Alliance represents both a shared, software-centric vision for the future of unified communications and a deep commitment to build on our existing offerings and relationship to help customers accelerate their business performance. This alignment of two industry leaders-makes it possible to integrate IT and telephony infrastructures and applications, bridging today's communication and collaboration silos to deliver unified communications.

Our combined technology, service and support offerings enable enterprise customers to enjoy tangible business benefits associated with our shared unified communications vision and execution plan. These solutions leverage a single client and common architecture, reducing IT complexity and providing greater stability than alternative solutions that make disparate components coexist. This design premise covers any deployment scenario, from on-premise, to hosted or hybrid, to branch deployments. Solutions also reflect a "graceful migration" strategy, in which existing investments in desktop technology and network infrastructure can be supported. In other words, there is no need to "rip & replace".

Nortel and Microsoft are jointly investing in three areas: Product Development, Sales and Marketing, and Systems Integration. This work includes:

Solution Development:
Both companies are working together to innovate and collaborate on solution development. Learn more about the current solution offerings.

Sales and Marketing:
Joint marketing efforts focused on bringing unified communications benefits to our joint customer base and channel partners.

Systems Integration:
Nortel Global Services is a solutions-focused professional services practice, providing unified communications-focused business processes, technology integration, implementation, and management expertise for customers. Learn more.

We believe the industry requires an evolutionary approach to ensure these benefits are accessible to the widest range of organizations, regardless of their current state of communications investment.

Alliance Partner Sites: