On a recent trip to Dallas, TX, I had the good fortune to visit with several senior members of Nortel’s (News - Alert) (News - Alert) management team, to discuss their participation in the upcoming launch of Microsoft’s (News - Alert) (News - Alert) OCS and to discuss what Nortel is doing in the unified communications space in general, beyond next week’s event.

Of course, much of what I heard is embargoed until the 16th of October, and I’ll have more on the news from Nortel within the next week. Bear with me!

Among the people I met with was Ruchi Prasad, Nortel’s vice president and general manager who heads up the relationship with Microsoft (News - Alert) that is the Innovative Communications Alliance (News - Alert) (ICA).

Prasad told me that "Nortel is excited about the upcoming OCS launch."

I last heard from Prasad back in June at a Nortel press and analyst unified communications event, which took place in Tampa, Florida.

At that time, Prasad, together with Greg St. James, International Director of Microsoft’s Real-Time Collaboration Business Group, presented a series of accomplishments of the then 11-month old ICA, and shared some thoughts on the progress of the alliance to date.

Four months ago, at the 11-month mark, there were already over 100 customers closed and hundreds more in the pipeline. Some of the names referenced included Fred Weber Construction, BT, Wannon Water, Shell, Indiana University, Jyske Bank and Austock.

While I’m not yet at liberty to divulge the exact number of customers, suffice it to say that Nortel and Microsoft have signed an impressive number of companies over the past half year or so.

Back in Tampa, Prasad and St. James spoke of the following series of unique values that the ICA brings to the enterprise market:

Also back in June at the media/analyst event I had the opportunity to speak with Paul Templeton, GM, Enterprise Voice for Nortel.

Templeton discussed the evolution of the industry, and how Nortel’s UC plans fit in to that evolution. "IP Telephony is evolving to unified communications as a software application as enterprises adopt service oriented architecture (SOA) to increase their business agility," he said.

"Thus is created a transformational opportunity for the enterprise."

Unified Communications (News - Alert) (News - Alert) is among the pillars of Nortel’s enterprise business, and together with application aware networks, applications convergence and the rise of integration services, this is how Nortel plans to enable business convergence.

Following on a similar theme, during the recent Dallas visit, I had the opportunity to spend some time with Nortel’s CTO and vice president, network architecture, Enterprise, Phil Edholm (News - Alert) (News - Alert).

We talked about SOA, and the evolution of the industry, to what Edholm called "Convergence (News - Alert) 2.0."

Regarding unified communications, Edholm described it as a convergence of information and interaction and business process.

He asked, "…how do we bring together communications information and business process?"

Edholm also pointed out that the intersection of information (often in the form of documents), workflow and communications modality is destined to bring real value to enterprise customers.

He referenced Nortel’s relationships with Microsoft and IBM (News - Alert) (News - Alert) on the documents (information) side, and ongoing work with IBM on SOA-based solutions.

"Fundamentally," Edholm concluded, "VoIP was a lot like the early days of the Internet, driven by cost savings. However, the critical change was the ability to change business process by leveraging the Internet."

Regarding what Nortel and IBM are doing in the unified communications space, their System i Unified Communications solution combines IBM’s System i business computing platform and the IBM Lotus Sametime unified communications and collaboration platform with Nortel’s VoIP and multimedia solutions. The resulting Unified Communications solution runs on a single system.