Edholm said increased employee productivity includes reducing the times it take to make a decision.

"Up to 90 percent of this time is wasted with calls waiting in queues or staff waiting for replies from e-mails; the six hours it normally takes to make a decision will be reduced to 15 minutes," he said.

To enable unified communications, Nortel has formed an alliance with Microsoft Corp. to jointly develop products that will ship by the end of 2007, including a hardware appliance for branch offices which ties together Nortel WAN and IP telephony technology with Microsoft messaging software. The companies also plan to insert parts of Nortel's Multimedia Conferencing platform into Microsoft Office Communicator 2007.

One alliance customer is energy giant Royal Dutch/Shell Group. The petroleum company, which has 112,000 employees in 130 companies, plans to consolidate its entire voice and messaging infrastructure using integrated Microsoft OCS and Nortel VOIP technologies over the next three to five years.

"Putting hardware into remote countries is a nightmare," said Johan Krebbers, group IT architect for the company. Instead of Shell's current model -- with hundreds of PBXs and e-mail servers distributed worldwide, all voice and messaging applications will be centrally hosted in three data centers to support oil exploration, refining and distribution operations worldwide.