For almost a year now Nortel engineers contributed significant components and code to the SIPfoundry sipXecs project. The SIPfoundry sipXecs project was selected by Nortel because of its solid and scalable architecture. The idea was to assess whether Nortel's next generation unified communications solution should be based on the sipXecs open source project.

Nortel now announced their new unified communications solution called Software Communications Server SCS 500 on April 10th. The SCS500 product is completely based on the sipXecs code base. In addition to the Nortel channel the SCS500 product is sold by Dell as well as IBM.

This is big news for us of course. It is not that often that a tier 1 player like Nortel adopts a solution that is developed by a third party. And it is not that often that a big player like Nortel adopts an open source project. Nortel is fully committed to contributing to the open source effort going forward. There are many exciting things coming in the next release. Among them conferencing, full SIP trunking and NAT traversal.