At a press conference in New York, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Mike Zafirovski, his counterpart at Nortel, also identified six early adopters of the joint technologies, which offer combined support for e-mail, phone calls, instant messaging and other forms of communication and are designed to tie Office and other Microsoft products to voice and data networks. Zafirovski said the two vendors have signed on 60 early adopters thus far.

But both executives conceded that they face an uphill battle to get corporate users to understand the potential value of unified communications. In an attempt to get over that hurdle, Microsoft and Nortel are kicking off a marketing and education initiative that will include setting up 100 demonstration centers this year, in addition to 20 that have already been opened.

The road map laid out by the companies includes several new offerings that are scheduled to be rolled out later this year. For example, they plan to deliver an "integrated branch" appliance that incorporates both Nortel and Microsoft technology to provide voice-over-IP and unified communications capabilities for remote offices. The device is due in the fourth quarter, but no pricing was announced.

Microsoft and Nortel also said they will bring out conferencing and unified messaging bundles that combine their respective products. In addition, they plan to extend an existing unified desktop and soft phone package offering VOIP, e-mail, instant messaging and user-presence capabilities to Nortel's Communication Server 2100, a carrier-grade enterprise telephony device that can support up to 200,000 users on a single system.

Johan Krebbers, an IT architect at Royal Dutch Shell PLC, appeared at the press conference with Ballmer and Zafirovski to describe his company's early efforts to link Microsoft and Nortel technologies for Shell's global workforce of 112,000 employees. Over the past year, Shell has rolled out about 2,000 Nortel phones that work with Microsoft's Office Communicator client software, Krebbers said in an interview after the press conference.