Microsoft today said it has set an alliance with Canada's Nortel Networks, the latest step in Microsoft's drive to promote software as a way to simplify how workers communicate with each other.
Under the agreement, the companies will develop traditional business phone systems into software, with a Microsoft unified communications software platform and Nortel software products to provide further advanced telephony functionality.
They will enter into a four-year agreement that can be extended, under which the companies will license some of each other's intellectual property and deploy the other's technologies in their corporate networks.