Nortel and Microsoft have announced plans to launch a unified communications (UC) Integrated Branch appliance in the fourth quarter of this year, integrating voice over IP (VoIP), instant messaging (IM) and presence functions on Nortel hardware.

Microsoft UK product manager for unified communications Mark Deakin said he did not yet have specific details on the product and could not confirm if the solution would be based on session initiation protocol (SIP), but said it was unlikely to feature e-mail messaging.

"The idea is to integrate VoIP and private branch exchange (PBX) type functionality onto a single box," he said.

The two companies plan to support native SIP interoperability between Nortel's Communication Server 1000 (CS1000) and Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Unified Messaging in the second half of 2007, with conferencing clients integrated into MS Office applications.

"We're currently interoperability testing against Nortel and Microsoft products and will be opening it out to our partners to test their SIP technology as well, though we cannot share who those will be at this time," added Deakin.

Butler Group analyst Mark Blowers expressed surprise at the announcement. "I was expecting more than this, Cisco and Avaya have already got a unified communications offering, and when you look at Cisco and their network strategy,
from a vision perspective, they're much further ahead," he said.