Nortel(NT) and Microsoft(MSFT) CEOs Outline Transformation of Business Communications

Today, Microsoft Corp. CEO Steve Ballmer and Nortel* CEO and President Mike Zafirovski announced a joint road map to deliver their shared vision for unified communications. The road map is the result of an alliance between Microsoft and Nortel announced in July 2006, and includes three new joint solutions to dramatically improve business communications by breaking down the barriers between voice, e-mail, instant messaging, multimedia conferencing and other forms of communication.
Speaking at an event at Studio 8H in Rockefeller Center to more than 100 customers along with reporters and analysts, Ballmer and Zafirovski outlined how companies can improve employee productivity and effectiveness and reduce the costs and complexity of communications. They also announced 11 new implementation services from Nortel and the opening of more than 20 joint demonstration centers where customers can experience the technology firsthand.

In just six months since the alliance was formed, the two companies have signed agreements with dozens of customers, and have developed a pipeline of hundreds of prospects who want to realize the benefits of unified communications.

“We are executing forcefully on the vision of this alliance and have made tremendous progress,” Zafirovski said. “We completed the planning stages and are now delivering unified communications solutions to businesses around the world. Our goal is to close the gap between the devices we use to communicate and the business applications we use to run our businesses, giving employees the power to use information more quickly and effectively.”

“The average employee gets more than 50 messages every day1 on up to seven different devices or applications,” Ballmer added. “Software can and will help address the ongoing challenge of managing communications and this challenge is the driving idea behind our alliance with Nortel. Together, we will evolve VoIP and unified communications to integrate all the ways we contact each other in a simple environment, using a single identity across phones, PCs and other devices.”

New Solutions to Improve Communications and Collaboration
Microsoft and Nortel formed the Innovative Communications Alliance to help companies transform business communications by speeding up the transition to voice over Internet protocol (VOIP) and unified communications. Delivering on the vision they outlined in July, Microsoft and Nortel today introduced three new solutions:

• UC Integrated Branch. This new product from the alliance will incorporate Nortel and Microsoft® technology on a single piece of hardware that delivers cost-effective, high-quality and easy-to-deploy VoIP and unified communications in remote offices. The UC Integrated Branch is planned to be available in the fourth quarter of 2007.
  
  
• Unified Messaging. To simplify customer deployments, native session initiation protocol (SIP) interoperability between the Nortel Communication Server 1000 and Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Unified Messaging is planned to be available in the second quarter of 2007. The solution includes Nortel professional services for design, deployment and support.
  
  
• Conferencing. This new solution will extend the rich feature set of Nortel Multimedia Conferencing to Microsoft Office Communicator 2007, delivering a single, familiar client experience consistent across applications such as voice, instant messaging, presence, and audio- and videoconferencing. The on-premise solution is planned to be available in the fourth quarter of 2007.

In 2007, the companies also plan to extend their current unified communications solution — a unified desktop and soft phone for VoIP, e-mail, instant messaging and presence — to the Nortel Communication Server 2100, a carrier-grade enterprise telephony product supporting up to 200,000 users on a single system.

In addition, Nortel and Microsoft presented a road map for 2008 and beyond for moving business communications onto a software platform designed to drive a higher-quality user experience and reduce total cost of ownership. The road map outlines several key applications and technology developments including a unified communications contact center, Nortel feature server, expanded hosted UC solutions, mobility and client solutions, and application-aware networking enhancements.

“Innovative communications and collaboration technologies are critical to fully enabling Royal Dutch Shell’s global work force, and key to operating at top quartile in our industry. We believe in and support the vision Nortel and Microsoft have outlined,” said Johan Krebbers, group IT architect at Royal Dutch Shell, who joined Ballmer and Zafirovski onstage for today’s event. “Over the next several years, we plan to migrate our network to a software-based communications system built on technologies represented by the Nortel and Microsoft alliance.”

Experiencing VoIP and Unified Communications Solutions

The companies announced that they have equipped more than 20 joint demonstration centers in North America, Europe and Asia, with more than 100 additional centers scheduled to open by midyear.

In a related announcement, Nortel added 11 core integration services to help customers build, deploy and support joint unified communications solutions, including end-to-end project management. Nortel already has more than 2,200 VoIP experts to deliver these services and will add more as deployment ramps up. This group is supported by the 10,000-strong Nortel global services team and a large ecosystem of services partners.

IBM Introduces Virtual Fabric Architecture for BladeCenter; Breakthrough Connectivity Speeds Help Enable Advanced Technologies Such as Web 2.0, IPTV

Today IBM (NYSE: IBM) introduced 'Virtual Fabric Architecture,' new interconnect technologies and management tools for the BladeCenter H system, to help increase speed and efficiency of data transfer across blade servers and networks. IBM Virtual Fabric Architecture has enabled IBM BladeCenter to deliver up to 43 percent system bandwidth advantage over HP BladeSystem for customers.

The explosion of new consumer technologies such as Web 2.0, IPTV, and online gaming, and business technologies such as quad-core processing and virtualization, are driving the need for high bandwidth interconnect technologies to move data traffic across high capacity networks. Introduced less than a year ago, IBM BladeCenter H is a high performance system that delivers the increased bandwidth needed by providing businesses up to 10 times the capacity to move data across their networks.

To help unleash the power inherent in the BladeCenter H design to further support such cutting edge technologies and applications, IBM is working with partners to introduce its Virtual Fabric Architecture with technologies including:

• Nortel 10G Ethernet Switch from BLADE Network Technologies and NetXen 10G Ethernet Expansion Card: An industry first complete solution with 10G Ethernet connectivity directly to a blade server from IBM's collaboration with BLADE Network Technologies and NetXen. The Nortel 10G Ethernet switch provides the highest levels of connectivity and ensures optimal throughput between each BladeCenter server in a system and to the network core. The NetXen10G expansion card provides high-performance, cost effective connectivity for the blade. The solution offers breakthrough 10G Ethernet pricing, an order of magnitude less than other offerings in the industry.
  
• Cisco Embedded Fibre Channel Fabric Switch: An industry first, the new Cisco embedded switch will allow customers to deploy end-to-end Cisco intelligent SAN services, such as VSANs, advanced security, and high availability. The new Fibre Channel switch is the next phase in a series of collaborations in switching between IBM and Cisco, and expands the switching solution offerings to include Fibre Channel, Ethernet and InfiniBand options.
  
• QLogic Ethernet and Fibre Channel InfiniBand Bridge Modules: An industry first in conjunction with the Cisco 4X InfiniBand Switch Module provides gateway functions for one or more InfiniBand-connected group of BladeCenter H systems to external Gb Ethernet or Fibre Channel networks.
  
• IBM BladeCenter Address Manager: Allows for the I/O virtualization of Ethernet and Fibre Channel connections within a system by providing BladeCenter customers the option to assign Ethernet and Fibre Channel port addresses used by their server blades via software as an alternative to the addresses that are burned-in to the hardware during manufacturing.BladeCenter Address Manager also uniquely supports a variety of fabrics from IBM ecosystem partners.
  
• IBM Multi-Switch Interconnect Module (MSIM): Designed by IBM to help double the number of Fibre Channel or Gb Ethernet connections to each blade. MSIM fits into the high speed switch slots in BladeCenter H, supports the entire BladeCenter switch portfolio.

IBM offers the widest range of networking and storage switches than any other blade vendor, and has shipped more than two million one-Gigabit Ethernet ports to date. Today we extend that lead by delivering even more I/O solutions including the industry's first integrated 10-Gigabit Ethernet connectivity to a blade.

"IBM BladeCenter is the world's most popular blade computing system, with more than 42 percent share of the market according to IDC. Since its introduction in 2002, IBM has installed more than half a million BladeCenter systems for customers and maintained a durable infrastructure platform by delivering new technology advances that remain compatible with IBM's original design innovation," said Doug Balog, vice president and business line executive, IBM BladeCenter. "With today's announcement it is clear that IBM has uniquely architected all facets of I/O to work as a central nervous system for IBM BladeCenter, delivering the optimal interconnection between blades, chassis, switches and our client's external networks."

Greater Portfolio Integration for IT Management

IBM is collaborating with Cisco to provide BladeCenter customers access to Cisco VFrame, a datacenter provisioning and orchestration product that enables utility computing, or the ability to rapidly commission and decommission shared pools of server and I/O resources on demand. VFrame system management software creates virtual "compute services" by programming server switches to map diskless servers to a shared pool of I/O and storage resources. VFrame dramatically reduces total cost of ownership by enabling administrators to provision compute services in seconds, not days or weeks; automate tasks based on business policies; and simplify network and server architectures.

IBM BladeCenter is also supported by the IBM Systems Director portfolio of platform management tools which integrate with Tivoli offerings to provide complete cross-enterprise service management. Key tools in the Systems Director family include: IBM Advanced Management Module to manage blades at the system level; IBM Virtualization Manager to provide a single point of access to manage, virtualize and optimize across physical and virtual systems; and PowerExecutive to optimize energy use and application performance. Systems Director together with Tivoli software solutions provide a service management platform that enables process automation and integration to achieve the operational efficiencies and effectiveness that our customers demand for their IT environments.

Blade.org Collaboration Drives Leadership in 10G Ethernet

Founded in 2006, Blade.org has fostered a collaborative community of over 80 members focused on accelerating the development solutions based on the blade server platform pioneered by IBM and Intel. The introduction today of the industry's first 10G Ethernet Switch from BLADE Network Technologies for IBM BladeCenter was the result of collaborative efforts among Blade.org partners: Broadcom, BLADE Network Technologies, IBM and NetXen.

"Working in collaboration with Broadcom, IBM and NetXen through Blade.org has afforded us a competitive advantage in the networking market, enabling us to be a first mover in 10G Ethernet," said Vikram Mehta, president and CEO, BLADE Network Technologies. "The new Nortel 10G switch from BLADE will help IBM BladeCenter customers further simplify their data center infrastructure, achieve dramatic improvements in performance, and significantly lower space, power, and cooling requirements associated with their server infrastructure."

The new switch from BLADE -- Nortel 10G Ethernet Switch Module (10GbESM) -- utilizes Broadcom's low power chips designed to empower networking equipment to transmit, manage and prioritize increasing amounts of complex voice, video and data traffic at broadband speeds. Nortel 10G provides 20 10G Ethernet ports -- 14 ports for connection to each blade in the system and six external ports for connection to the network. The switch can be used with IBM BladeCenter H in conjunction with a new dual port 10G Ethernet expansion card from NetXen that can support offload of TCP/IP, iSCSI and RDMA protocols, significantly improving throughput and reducing host CPU utilization to enable system performance to scale dramatically.

Pricing and Availability

All products are available today, with exception of BladeCenter Address Manager which will be available in the second half of 2007.


Nortel 10G Ethernet Switch Module list price: $9799 (20 ports)
NetXen 10G Ethernet Expansion Card: $899 (dual port)

Cisco Systems 4Gb Fibre Channel Switch Module: $14999 (20 ports) and $8999 (10 ports)
QLogic Ethernet InfiniBand Bridge Module: $8149
QLogic InfiniBand Fibre Channel Bridge Module : $9799

For more information about IBM BladeCenter, visit: www.ibm.com/bladecenter
For more information about Blade.org, visit: www.blade.org
For more information on IBM, visit: www.ibm.com