The Return of All-in-One UCThe Return of All-in-One UC

I've been intrigued these past few months in the uptick in MCS 5100 sales that Nortel has been announcing.

When Nortel and Microsoft announced their Innovative Communications Alliance a couple years back and then the Converged Office solution that combines Communications Server PBXs with Office Communications Server 2007, I kind of wrote off Nortel's MCS 5100 platform. I know the company never said it was abandoning this granddaddy of unified communications solutions, but I figured most marketing and sales emphasis would be around solutions stemming from the Microsoft relationship.So I've been intrigued these past few months in the uptick in MCS 5100 sales that Nortel has been announcing. There's Tenants of The Energy, Fudan University, Geisinger Health System, MDA National, and RMIT University. In some cases, Nortel customers seem to be deploying or trialing the MCS 5100 mainly for its multimedia conferencing capabilities. But in other instances it's a full-fledged unified communications solution, complete with rich presence and corporate instant messaging, that's being deployed on the MCS 5100.

Becoming a single source of telephony, telephony presence and corporate instant messaging technology has become a trend among IP PBX developers. Alcatel-Lucent's OmniTouch Suite has long delivered all three. As I've noted before, ShoreTel is now offering a native presence server. It turns out Mitel is doing the same. Its Unified Communicator Advanced, which became generally available this month, now has a native presence engine that's based on technology that Mitel has licensed from CounterPath and now controls the intellectual property rights of. Of course Cisco's acquisition of Jabber was all about baking more robust corporate IM capabilities into its telephony-centric Unified Presence Server. And Avaya has native IM on the roadmap for its Intelligent Presence Server.

This is all extremely interesting. For the past couple years Microsoft has been telling its Office Communications Server customers that they will be able to integrate OCS with third-party PBXs...or use its increasingly robust VoIP capabilities as an alternative. Now the voice systems developers are saying their PBX customers can integrate with OCS...or use their own native corporate instant messaging software as an alternative. Microsoft, it seems, is getting a taste of its own medicine.I've been intrigued these past few months in the uptick in MCS 5100 sales that Nortel has been announcing.