On June 29th, 2005, France Telecom and Microsoft announced a strategic deal to co-develop innovative products and technologies that enable customers to benefit from the new opportunities of the digital world through innovative convergent services.

As part of this partnership, Didier Lombard, Chairman and CEO France Telecom and Steve Ballmer, CEO Microsoft Corporation are presenting the first two initiatives in this strategic partnership.

First, France Telecom and Microsoft will cooperate on a next-generation service platform to enable the aggregation and delivery of a wide variety of services, including voice, video and data.

Digital convergence brings many new opportunities for users to utilize multiple devices across many different networks. There is a need for next-generation service platforms, for triple play and beyond, in order to evolve from side-by-side services, and provide users with a much richer experience, giving the liberty to combine TV, voice over IP (VoIP), instant messaging (IM), presence, content, and many other services simultaneously and with great flexibility.