Intel and Siemens will collaborate on developing new technology for Internet telephony, the two companies said on Thursday. Intel and Siemens said they wanted to expand the scope of Internet telephony, popularized by Skype, to build communications systems for corporate customers such as providers of telecoms and financial services and digital healthcare.

"Siemens has a strong commitment to this joint development effort and to ongoing collaboration with Intel," Thomas Zimmermann, president of Siemens' Enterprise Systems division, said in a statement.

Siemens hopes to sell its Enterprise Systems division, which specializes in building telecoms systems for large corporations, by the end of the month.

To start with, the two companies said they would co-fund research and work together in the fields of secure wireless networks and real-time communications based on Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP).

The technology they want to develop will be based on Intel's dual-core chips and rack-mounted servers, along with Siemens' HiPath 8000 and OpenScape telecoms technology.

The two companies said they would present their first joint findings to selected customers at an Intel laboratory in the United States by the end of the year.