Nortel said Dell will offer its North American customers all of Nortel's enterprise products and services, including those developed under an alliance with Microsoft.

Under the arrangement, Dell will become a sales channel for Nortel's Enterprise Solutions group, offering voice, data, wireless and optical products, as well as those developed under the Nortel and Microsoft Innovative Communications Alliance (ICA) for unified communications.

Dell also will provide a suite of professional services to support unified communications from the Nortel Express Services portfolio. Offerings may include prepackaged implementation, support and management services with direct access to Nortel's technical expertise.

This announcement is part of a launch by Dell this week to offer a series of products and partnerships for unified communications that extend from desktops to data centers, including software, telephony and services.

In a separate announcement, Nortel said it and Microsoft have collected more than 300 joint wins representing more than 900,000 licenses in the year since forming the ICA alliance. Nortel also said it plans to offer a broad portfolio of unified communications systems and applications built around Microsoft's Office Communications Server 2007 and Office Communicator 2007, which were launched this week.

Nortel said it will launch in the first quarter of 2008 the following OCS 2007-based products:

-- Nortel Converged Office, which integrates the telephony feature set of Nortel's IP-PBX with OCS 2007 to enable Office Communicator as the single user interface to perform VoIP soft client, nstant messaging, presence, conferencing and remote call control of any desk phone connected to a Nortel IP-PBX.

-- Multimedia Conferencing 5.0, a reservationless, customer premise audio/video sytem that provides subscribers with access to an "always on" conferencing resource. The integration of Nortel's Multimedia Conferencing with OCS 2007 can support on premise users with desktop clients, analog phones, digital or IP phones, as well as partners, customers and remote callers.

-- The UC Integrated Branch combines Microsoft Mediation functionality into the Nortel Secure Router 4134. The branch office platform integrates WAN routing, Ethernet switching, security and VoIP into a single platform to extend unified communications functionality into the branch office.

-- Nortel application switches and accelerators optimized from OCS 2007 and Microsoft SharePoint and Outlook Web Access applications.

-- The LG-Nortel IP Phone 8500 series of unified communications devices, a product of the LG-Nortel joint venture, optimized for use with OCS 2007 and Office Communicator 2007 to allow access to unified communications capabilities, such as VoIP, directory dialing, calendar integration, call diversion and presence checking.