"Effective immediately, this gives us a message to help customers make a buying decision," said Stuart Chandler, president and CEO of Optivor Technologies, a Nortel partner in Jessup, Md. The pact with Microsoft will give Optivor customers a tremendous confidence boost and help push those on the fence toward Nortel purchases, he said.
The services revenue expected to come to the channel from the alliance will also be tremendous as partners help build solutions that tie together networking, voice, messaging and mobility, Chandler said. "It will give us an opportunity to engage as a systems integrator because there will be more applications," he said.
Under the wide-ranging Innovative Communications Alliance announced last week, Microsoft and Nortel said they will collaborate on R&D to converge IP voice, networking and communications with software.
Ken Winell, CEO of ExpertCollab, a Florham Park, N.J.-based Microsoft partner, said he sees new opportunities for partners that sell unified communications platforms.
"The Nortel-Microsoft alliance is interesting. Nortel is a formidable force in telephony and will bring the expertise around VoIP and integration into the unified stack that Microsoft can leverage," he said.
Subsea cable alternatives can provide a level of comfort for those concerned about disruptions. Realistically, they will continue to play a small, but critical role in the short term.
Maintaining existing network infrastructures often incurs huge technical debt before newer technologies are adopted over time.
Amid ongoing regional uncertainties, telecom infrastructure in the Middle East has expand to include terrestrial low-latency network infrastructure, which offers resilience and agility in navigating political complexities without relying solely on undersea networks.
