Back in March, Orange Business marked the eighteenth month of its “Business Together with Microsoft” marketing program by offering a new instance of Microsoft’s Office Communications Server 2007 R2 that integrates OCS into a managed offering built on Cisco IP-Telephony infrastructure. At the time, through the Business Together program, 450,000 enterprise end-users were already using Microsoft Communicator supplied by Orange.

The Business Together program brought Cisco more tightly into the mix of products and services positioning Communicator as a single point of entry for real-time, multi-modal communications including IM, email, and mobile telephony. The Cisco connection starts with Cisco branded IP-phones that facilitate both presence indicators and “click-to-call” call initiation among other employees or business partners with contact lists associated with Microsoft’s OCS, Outlook, Office suite or SharePoint software. I believe Microsoft’s Active Directory server must be involved as well.

Meanwhile, Aspect Software continues to chronicle advancements in OCS deployment both internally and externally. As part of the inside game Aspect continues to illustrate the adoption and use of OCS throughout its company on this site. [As a brief aside, it looks like "federated" IMing has a long way to go.] For outside consumption, Aspect announced general availability of a suite of software called UC for the Contact Center. This instance extends OCS-based IM into the contact center to facilitate functions like “Ask and Expert”. It also marks the marketing debut of Tellme (Microsoft’s IVR subsidiary) as the integrated speech application service provider (ASP) for “hybrid” voice self-service deployments.

Both approaches are designed to accelerate deployment of applications built on a decidedly Microsoft-flavored approach to Unified Communications. For Aspect, UC is a Microsoft-only proposition, with tight integration to Aspect’s suite of inbound and outbound customer care software suites and workforce management software. Orange Business has a number of other approaches, including an instance of Genesys Customer Interaction Management to support multivendor environments.