Software giant Microsoft has announced some 430,000 licences have been handed out for its unified communications (UC) products, developed jointly with Nortel.

The two companies teamed up last year to create a common platform for business communications, including instant messaging and voice calls over IP networks (VoIP), to allow new products to be made specifically to fit into this system and so allow easy 'plug and play' functionality for users.

With hundreds of thousands of licences already taken up for the UC technology, IT research firm Gartner suggests this shows that more companies are seeing the value of using the IP-based systems.

Bern Elliot, vice-president at Gartner, told Computer Weekly: "UC products matured significantly during the past 12 months and by the end of 2007, 80 per cent of enterprise communications purchase decisions will require support for unified communications."

This follows a study released earlier this month by Infonetics Research which found that worldwide sales of UC products increased by a fifth between 2005 and 2006 to £191 million.

This then grew by a just over a quarter in the following year to a total of £253 million, showing the speed at which UC systems are continuing to be adopted by businesses.