Servers to include Nortel telephony

By JUAN CARLOS PÉREZ
IDG News Service, 03/16/99

Responding to companies' needs to merge their voice and data network traffic, Northern Telecom yesterday announced that it has decided to provide some of its telephony products as components that computer manufacturers can integrate into their systems.

Previously Nortel's telephony applications were available only with the company's proprietary systems. However, Nortel has decided to sell its applications to OEMs because more and more companies want to unify their voice and data services, company officials said. Having telephony applications run on an open systems server in the corporate network instead of in a proprietary system is a step in the direction of bringing voice and data traffic together.

Hewlett-Packard will be the first to include Nortel products in its systems. By mid-year HP plans to ship two new communications servers that will feature Nortel telephony applications, use processors from Intel and run on Microsoft's Windows NT server.

"What we've come together to announce is something that will make business simpler," said HP Chairman Lew Platt. "We check e-mail messages on our computers, voice mail messages on our telephones, and (we) run back and forth to fax machines to get other information ... The existence of all these different worlds frankly makes life very complex."

"HP and our collaborators here intend to radically change the customer experience," Platt said.

The HP Business Communications Server will be aimed at small and mid-size businesses and will ship with Nortel's Voice portfolio of telephony applications for things like PBX services and voice mail. Users can also add more advanced Nortel Voice applications to enable, for example, IP telephony and unified messaging services.

Meanwhile, the HP Business Messaging Server, for mid-size and large businesses, will feature Nortel's CallPilot messaging product designed to let users manage a variety of messages-via voice mail, e-mail and fax-from a single interface on their PCs.

HP will be in charge of selling and supporting these servers.

Computer systems from OEMs that feature Nortel's telephony products as components will carry a brand mark that reads Nortel Networks Connects, the company said.

Meanwhile, HP, Microsoft and Nortel will open two Microsoft Windows NT Enterprise Centers of Excellence to develop and test communications applications based on NT. This clearly indicates that this announcement is not a one-shot deal. It is the beginning of a long-term development effort in this area by these vendors, said Bill Gates, chairman and CEO of Microsoft.

"Having this center of excellence lab indicates that we see this as not just a single product announcement ... but as a foundation of these companies working together to go even further in the direction that allows for this rich digital nervous system," Gates said.