Nortel announced this morning that it's buying Pingtel, which helped pioneer the concept of open source IP telephony. Nortel bought Pingtel from Bluesocket, a wireless LAN company that had, itself, acquired Pingtel last year. Terms were not disclosed.
This is actually not Nortel's first venture into open source. Last year, the company announced an integration of Nortel call control software with IBM's System i, but the Nortel software was built not off of existing Nortel systems like the CS1000 series, but instead upon open source elements OEMed from SIPFoundry, an open source IP telephony consortium of which Pingtel was a member.
Here's the statement from David Downing, Nortel's GM, Enterprise and SMB Communications Systems:
This acquisition is another building block in Nortel's vision to be a software-centric company and the leading provider of unified communications solutions. We believe that bringing Pingtel's critical R&D capabilities in-house will enable us to further develop software-based solutions that go beyond the boundaries of our previous OEM relationship. We expect that this will enable Nortel to accelerate the development of new IT-centric channels to market.
Obviously, this isn't a huge development, but it is an interesting one. Nortel's use of open source for its System i integration stood in contrast to the other major System i IP telephony integration, that of 3Com, which integrated its own internally-developed software with the IBM mid-range platform. Nortel seems to be looking to open systems to help it leverage market opportunities more quickly. Whether this will give a boost to the concept of openness remains to be seen.
Update: I had a chance to speak with David Downing just now, and he noted that while the Nortel BCM hybrid product remains strong in the SMB picture for the vendor, Nortel has seen growing interest in the SCS500, which is Nortel's Pingtel-based call control product. The SCS500 is native SIP and scales to 500 stations, and David said that, "I suspect we'll probably go upmarket in the future" with the platform, though he can't yet say how far upmarket. He said the SCS500 has been "getting a lot of traction" both on the System i platform (which IBM now calls Power Systems), as well as standalone running on common off-the-shelf servers (Nortel also claims Dell as a channel partner for the SCS500).
Nortel decided to acquire Pingtel (the deal closed last Friday) in order to ensure that it continues to have control over the future direction of the software, David Downing said. He added that Nortel will continue to support the open source work of Pingtel, even as it develops and differentiates the SCS500 and related applications under its own control.
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