Canadian kit vendor Nortel on Wednesday announced the acquisition of software-based unified communications firm Pingtel.

Nortel bought the assets of Pingtel from enterprise wifi vendor Bluesocket for an undisclosed sum, and will roll the company’s unified comms portfolio in with its own.

The Canadian firm said the purchase is key to Nortel’s vision to be a software-centric company, as the troubled vendor seeks to turn its fortunes around.

Earlier this month, Nortel reported an increase in net losses to $113m in the second quarter of 2008, compared to a loss of $37m in the same period last year.

The company said it will use the software capabilities of Pingtel to deliver unified communications platforms to enterprise customers of all segments. In the near term, Pingtel will bring critical software elements to Nortel’s small to medium business (SMB) unified communications offering based on the Nortel Software Communication System 500 (SCS500).

David Downing, general manager, Enterprise and SMB Communications Systems at Nortel, said: “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.”

Over a year ago Nortel joined the open source community established by SIPfoundry as an active contributor to the sipXecs open source project led by Pingtel.