Nortel will announce its fourth release of the Multimedia Communications Server 5100, which will be integrated with IBM Lotus Notes and will feature collaboration for voice, video, conferencing, e-mail, instant messaging and presence technologies. It will also support new Session Initiation Protocol-based phones, said Tony Rybczynski, director of strategic enterprise technologies.

The fifth release of Communication Server 1000, also being announced, will be able to serve 22,000 users, up from 15,000 users on a single machine, he said.

Also, a new carrier-grade Unified Messaging 2000 server will be introduced to support up to 1 million users, allowing access to voice mail, fax and e-mail through common e-mail applications. In addition, Nortel plans to announce a new family of Ethernet routing switches designed to allow migration to voice over IP, the Ethernet Routing Switch 2500 and the ERS 4500. Pricing was not announced.