A month after Lucent Technologies Inc’s $1.8bn purchase of integrated messaging company Octel Communications Inc (CI No 3,206), Lucent’s Canadian rivals, Northern Telecom Ltd, has taken a minority stake in another unified messaging company, privately held Telinet Technologies LLC of Norcross, Georgia. Nortel will also license Telinet’s products and integrate them into its own products. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed. Telinet launched its first product, MediaMail, in October of last year, and has since been holding trials in Manitoba Province, Canada with the local telecommunications provider MTS Advanced. MediaMail is cross-platform, server-based software providing access to electronic mail, voicemail and fax messages through any Web browser and any touch tone phone. It is aimed at Internet service providers, telecommunications companies and Fortune 1000 firms. It uses open standards such as the POP3 Poet Office Protocol, IMAP4 Internet Mail Access Protocol, MIME, SMTP, HTML and Javascript. It also uses the RealAudio Player from Progressive Networks Inc. As well as working on Windows, Macintosh and Unix systems, the product is compatible with non-PC devices such as personal digital assistants, Web-enabled televisions, network computers and wireless devices such as pagers and cellular phones. The two will market the product to Nortel’s customer base.
