Nortel, a notable exception, says its Nortel Agile Communication Environment, or NACE, will work with third-party hardware from the get-go, using a set of connectors to provide translation. When the product ships in May, it will support Cisco Call Manager via a SIP interface, for example, as well as Nortel gear.
Typically, supporting third-party hardware through standard interfaces such as SIP comes with a reduction in functionality. Though capabilities within the normal range of SIP services shouldn't present a problem, niceties such as parking a call have been vexing. Enterprises interested in running NACE on non-Nortel switches should ensure that the setup supports the capabilities important to them.WE WANT IT ALL
Presence, IM, voice, and video are top drivers for unified communications, yet new SOA-integrated communications systems offer a mixed bag of support.
Providing presence status to know which users can be contacted in a given business process at any time, and the proper modalities, requires an authoritative presence server. For Nortel and Microsoft, that will be Office Communications Server (OCS). Avaya says it will introduce a presence server this week that will federate with other presence engines. This would allow users on OCS, IBM/Lotus Sametime, and Avaya's system to see a common presence status. At the beginning of this month Siemens announced a SIP server, the Unified Communications Server, which will include federated presence, quality-of-service management, and more.
There's a growing consensus that IM capabilities will be from either Microsoft OCS or Sametime. All PBX vendors integrate with both platforms, but there are major distinctions between the two. Microsoft knows the desktop, and that's evident in how it approaches unified communications. Everything gets consolidated down to one presence source, regardless of the user's device. Presence indicators tie neatly into Exchange and other Microsoft applications. The flip side is that OCS remains highly dependent on a Microsoft-centric infrastructure. Exchange 2007 is needed, for example, to gain unified messaging.
IBM Lotus speaks the language of large IT organizations that eschew vendor lock-in. The company's strategy is to partner with PBX suppliers rather than looking to offer the complete unified communications package; in fact, Cisco began reselling Sametime in January. Sametime and Notes are built on the Eclipse open source development environment, which gives IBM Lotus a flexible platform that can be extended by customers or third-party developers and run on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS.
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