Edholm will be joined at the breakfast seminar by Shara Evans, the founder of research firm, Market Clarity, and Paul O'Grady, the director of unified communications at Microsoft Australia.

To provide the right product set to deliver unified communications, Microsoft and Nortel last year formed an alliance to jointly develop products integrating VOIP, messaging server and desktop software.

Customers can expect to go from a separate PBX and separate server environments to one where Nortel's VOIP servers deliver the full telephony experience with both platforms running on standard Intel architecture. The first round of products will ship later this year and has been welcomed by large organizations such as energy giant Shell.

The petroleum company, which has 112,000 employees, plans to consolidate its entire voice and messaging infrastructure over the next three to five years using jointly developed Nortel and Microsoft products.

"Putting hardware into remote countries is a nightmare," according to Shell's IT architect, Johan Krebbers.