Even though Microsoft and ARM have a relationship that dates back to the mid-1990s, Microsoft Windows is, for good reason, most closely associated with Intel (WinTel being the predominant desktop combo in enterprise settings). Yet Ed Sperling gets it exactly right when he points out that ARM performs better than the Intel ATOM processor when it comes to power management, in battery-powered mobile or embedded devices.

Taking the two announcements together, we can expect Windows Phone-based products to have sufficient battery life and do a better job of recognizing and rending spoken utterances than current models.

Keeping with the Hawaiian theme, the program incorporates initiatives that have been conducted as part of Microsoft’s “Mobile Assistance Using Infrastructure” (MAUI) Project. Its purpose is to enable “a new class of cpu- and data-intensive applications that seamlessly augment the cognitive abilities of users by exploiting speech recognition, NLP, vision, machine learning, and augmented reality”. Based on experience with WinMobile 6 and 6.5, it determined that such a project is required to define how to overcome issues surrounding battery life (which it calls “energy limitations of handhelds) “by leaveraging nearby computing infrastructure”, which is believed to encompass resources in Microsoft’s storage and compute cloud (Azure) accessible over wireless networks (WiFi, WLAN, FemtoCell…)

In a nutshell, Microsoft says that the mobile “platform” runs on a Windows Mobile 6.5 smartphone (with Windows Phone 7 “in planning”). The services that are invoked in Microsoft’s cloud include Bing Maps for mapping services, and Windows Live ID for user identification. More detail on MAUI can be found on the Microsoft Research Web site.

In other words, Web developers can build communications-enabled apps “without knowing anything about communications.” Genius!

As characterized by Hussain, ACE is the product of marketing “pull” that crosses several functional areas in an enterprise. Demand starts at the functional level, where platform incompatibilities may have thwarted a departmental head’s efforts to reap the benefits promised by providers of “unified communications.” ACE comes to the rescue with shrink-wrapped “connectors” for Cisco, Avaya (including the vestiges of the Nortel CMS line), Tandberg (video endpoints), IBM SameTime, and Microsoft OCS. Thus Avaya makes it possible to overcome incompatibilities with a single DVD that runs on a couple of servers and carries a list price of $10,000-$12,000 for the core license plus per user fees of $50-$100.

As for common use cases, Hussain provided profiles of implementations at a number of global businesses. For example a multi-branch global bank provided a form of “follow-me” connectivity by providing “hot desks” for itinerant executives. The service integrates a voice network that includes IP-PBXs from both Avaya and Cisco with presence management and call origination based on IBM Sametime. In other instances, the ACE SDK was used to “communications enable” business processes and workflows with APIs to CRM and knowledge management systems to support better medical care or customer care in financial services.

Architecturally, ACE resides “on top of” Aura, Avaya’s branded middleware SIP-based communications. Hussain explained that Avaya’s product offering has changed so that ACE will emerge as the application development environment for Aura as well as multivendor environments, and that the “lower layer toolkit (back into Aura Session Manager) will be ACE.”

Hussain, who is a veteran of the “Nortel side of Avaya”, was especially pleased that ACE is now a part of Avaya’s DevConnect program, referring to Avaya’s community of 3rd party developers, acknowledging that this sort of program was “missing at Nortel.”

Avaya is on the right track with ACE. It is putting tools into the hands of the people that are driving enterprise-wide innovation and making sure that key elements of Avaya’s existing fabric for call-handling, voice processing and multi-media interactions remains entrenched in multi-vendor solutions. The short list of supported vendors – IBM, Microsoft, Cisco/Tandberg – is not as “open” as might be ideal, but it does represent a high percentage of Avaya’s current market space.

As illustrated on the Microsoft Azure Web site, the folks in Redmond are making a direct attack on Amazon’s Elastic Cloud platform, but doing so in a way that has explicit hooks into the latest .Net application framework. The special sauce is the Azure Platform AppFabric, as described here. Its intent is to make it easy for Web services developers to combine, integrate and/or federate resources and services regardless of location (on premises or in the cloud).

I mentioned Bing Maps in the first graph of this post because Microsoft is using Tech-Ed to launch a new Bing Map App Software Development Kit (SDK) with the expressed purpose of encouraging developers to build location-aware applications “on top of” Bing Maps. A new Bing Maps API, made generally available later this year, will enable developers to build more robust “mashups” that, at a minimum, will incorporate real time information (Tweets, blog posts, photos, search results) as overlays of the maps, satellite views and street views that have been fodder for some very eye-catching demos in the past few months.

Attendees were also excited to learn that, for the first time, Microsoft was unveiling the full list of features for both Microsoft Office Communications Server (Version 14) and the latest Exchange Service Pack. According to a company press release, “Key new features in this release include expert search, Office document and application sharing, and one-click meeting access from Outlook, SharePoint and mobile phones.” None of that sounds particularly new, but it is always nice to see OCS getting some props and exposure among a broader set of IT professionals and developers.

Speech processing, call processing and multimodal communications got little or no attention in the pre-conference promotion. Instead, Microsoft applied the Law of Large Numbers to puff up the importance of its announcements (which admittedly fall in the shadow of the announcement of a new iPhone). The importance of Azure is in its reach. As Microsoft explains, Azure is one of “the world’s largest cloud services — with more than 600 million unique users on MSN, 4 billion Bing search queries monthly, more than 500 million active Windows Live IDs, 20 million users of the rapidly growing Xbox Live gaming service, and 40 million paid users of Microsoft Online Services across 9,000 business customers and more than 500 government entities. Thousands of customers in more than 40 countries have moved to production environments with Windows Azure, an Internet-scale cloud computing services platform hosted in Microsoft datacenters.”

Azure is not quite Google (in scale or feature set) and it’s not quite Amazon.com’s EC2 in terms of support of ecommerce functions and back-ending IP-telephony switches and apps (think Asterisk, Twilio, Tropo…). Yet it is destined to play a very important role as part of the interstitial fabric among multiple enterprises for application sharing, conferencing and collaboration. There’s a long row to hoe, if it aims to make a mark in mobile commerce or the fast-growing world of IP-based, multi-modal communications. Then again, there’s no better place to get things started than a partners’ conference with over 10,000 attendees.

Of greater interest from our point of view is the integration of Microsoft’s Tellme service into the Windows Mobile mix – this time as the foundation for voice-based turn-by-turn driving directions. It has been over a year since Greg Sterling posted this assessment of Tellme Mobile and its ability to support voice-based search, messaging and call origination. As one of the originators of the whole “Voice Portal” concept, Tellme has had the ability to offer turn-by-turn directions for a number of years.

Starting with the first Droid and its “car mount” (introduced in October 2009), smartphone makers have had their sights set on the Personal Navigation Device (PND) market. Just last week, Nokia stepped up competition by creating a marketplace for “own voices” to provide turn-by-turn directions for its OVI Maps application. Making turn-by-turn directions part of the Bing Mobile application makes navigation an integral part of the local, mobile search experience and is a very nice touch.

Microsoft already incorporates directions (sans the “voice guide” feature) into the Bing app on iPhones and Androids. The new application is designed to work on the Sprint, T-Mobile, or AT&T networks, and could emerge as an important differentiator in what is emerging as an increasingly competitive market.

In this article in InformationWeek, David Berlind points out that Google Docs already claims some 25 million users in 2 million companies. Meanwhile, Microsoft continues to sort out its strategy for moving its Office Suite into the cloud, in concert with installations of Sharepoint or Office Communications Server or some other configuration. Meanwhile, companies plow ahead with their own solutions that are a mix-and-match set of PC-based, private cloud and public cloud-based resources.

Sharp Electronics manufactures the two phones. Both conform to the “slider” style (meaning that a full QWERTY keyboard slides out from under the touchscreen to support messaging and info entry). Both have cameras that, in the words of Microsoft product manager Derek Snyder, are designed to provide high-quality images from “dimly lit clubs”. The salient difference is that the Kin 1 is much smaller than the Kin 2.

What’s striking is the level of effort Microsoft has put into integrating its operating system software and cloud-based assets into supporting the objectives of social networkers. Like Motorola’s Motoblur, the challenge was to aggregate information and images from multiple social feeds. In this case, Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 operating system is much less fuzzy than Motoblur because it provides for an endless “loop” which can be scrolled through ad infinitum.

A single green “Kin Spot” persistently appears at the bottom of the screen. users can drag images, calendar items and the like into the spot for the purpose of sharing with others. An integration of Bing Maps with a cloud-based photo-sharing site called Kin Studio. Snyder shared a “Fun Fact” that Microsoft discovered: Only about a third of mobile phone owners have figured out how to extract photos from their devices. Not only does Kin Studio make it easy, the Kin automatically geotags and dates each photo so that it can be displayed on Bing Maps for later remembering and reminiscing.

Microsoft has worked closely with Verizon Wireless during design and testing of the Kin and related services. A Spokesperson for VZW said that the phones will be available for sale “in May” and that his company has the exclusive rights to sell the Kin. Outside the U.S. Vodafone has exclusive rights.

The media management and distribution assets associated with the Zune player are also integrated into Kin and the Kin infrastructure. Snyder demonstrated how the device supports search, discovery, sampling, display and purchase of music and video entertainment through a Zune app on the device. Thus, for the targeted market of socially active networkers, Kin is a formidable competitor to iPhones, Android-based devices and other general purpose smartphones.

Pictures and links to videos and the like can be seen here, on Microsoft’s Image Gallery.

Yap was launched in 2006 by long-time IBM software maven Igor Jablokov and his brother Vic. Igor had been a long time proponent of multimodal and mobile applications coming out of IBM’s labs and its software group. At the start, the Yap platform was pretty much Big Blue through and through, although Igor always maintained that delivering a high quality speech recognition product was based on constant use, testing and refinement, as opposed to the use of any particular recognition engine. Well the Sprint deal shows the sort of opportunities that such agnosticism can promote.

The downloadable app is available on the “business on main” Web site embedded in MSN. Microsoft’s selection of Yap is a bit curious, given that the company obtained a very robust set of mobile software for Blackberries (along with the hosted voice portal software) when it acquired Tellme. What’s more, under “speech Czar” Zig Sarafin, the company has been highlighting its own initiatives around the Tellme, Bing Mobile and Microsoft Speech brands, as signaled in this landing page.

As we noted in this brief posting about Safafin’s video debut, Microsoft has a broad set of initiatives around speech. Yet it becomes increasingly evident that each family of speech-based problems (such as rendering spoken words as text messages or emails) requires a specific set of solutions. In this case, in spite of all its R&D investment and technology acquisitions the company went to a cloud-based service to back end its home-grown app.

This announcement from Microsoft and Amazon.com certainly leaves a lot to the imagination, especially when thinking about Recombinant Communications (RC) tactics. In it, Microsoft reveals that Amazon.com is paying an undisclosed sum and entering an agreement by which each company provides “access to the other’s patent portfolio” which “covers a broad range of products and technology, including coverage for Amazon’s popular e-reading device, Kindle™”.

Even though Microsoft says that it has entered more than 600 deals since it started its licensing program in late 2003, this one is of great interest as both companies position themselves to offer new services in opposition to non-traditional competitors who are fellow software superpowers. Microsoft makes a point of mentioning that it has an interest in the publishing platform embedded in Amazon.com’s Kindle. That would signal a direct assault against Apple’s iTunes-based e-commerce platform, as well as some preemptive positioning versus Google’s ever-growing roster of cloud-based resources. Apropos of “the cloud”, Microsoft’s statement also makes mention of Amazon’s Linux-based technology. This really is losing one’s religion around Windows-based servers.

The fate of Windows Phone is another matter. With Microsoft showcasing a graphics-laden, Zune-like roster of applets running on a range of mobile devices, the idea of piecing together a back-end system that is “the best of…” cloud-based e-commerce resources from Amazon and Microsoft has tremendous merit. The fact that Amazon is paying Microsoft to cement the relationship without discussing which elements are of interest to the Web-based retailing giant is also ripe for speculation. At a minimum, it signals that the fast-growing (though comparatively diminutive) Amazon Web Services group will be able to make more serious inroads into enterprise IT infrastructure, especially where companies are committed to Windows-based servers.

At a minimum, Amazon.com’s EC2 (Electronic Commerce Cloud) and Microsoft’s Azure, will start looking a lot more like one another. This spells a stronger position for both in yet another large area of opportunity now dominated by Oracle and fast-growing Salesforce.com. An RC-based approach is key to understanding how these developments will play out. Open-ended, cross-licensing agreements makes it possible for either company to piece together solutions from both “open” and proprietary elements of their current technologies. RC makes it possible to re-assemble these pieces and move them forward into new products and services that directly address a customer’s (or end user’s) needs. It may be as mundane as providing a better way to re-schedule a sales call in Outlook or Microsoft CRM from a mobile phone, or it might be a full-blown effort to make Microsoft’s Azure a stronger competitor to Google Apps.

From our perspective, this is a watershed deal that reflects a major change in the competitive landscape.

[Update: Long-time Microsoft follower Mary-Jo Foley posted these comments earlier. At base, she says that Amazon is "using Linux" to pay Microsoft for unspecified patent infringements. She notes that, although this was not a joint press release, there was no corresponding notice from Amazon.

This hardly sounds like the basis of a joint development effort in cloud computing or e-publishing.]

Symbolically, the move signals that Nuance (especially with the Dragon brand) is emerging as the most-favored speech-processing technology across Apple’s broad spectrum of computing and communications platforms, including personal computers, notebooks, laptops, iPhones, iPods and (we would supposed) the upcoming iPad. As we’ve all learned from the “Google phenomenon”, the more utterances that a company is able to collect on behalf of a broad customer base, the better the odds of accurate rendering of spoken words. Stated differently, deeper integration into Apple’s application environment should translate into a better user experience as those users help computers “learn” to understand what they are saying.

Google’s “cloud-based” approach to speech recognition makes it “platform agnostic”, therefore we will continue to see speech-enabled Google applications on iPhones and other connected platforms. Google will continue to use the voluminous amounts of spoken phrases to expand a portfolio of offerings that already includes search, transcription and translation. Nuance’s is responding by forging relationships aimed to make its speech-enabled applications work well on Mac’s and other Apple branded products, while at the same time supporting multimodal communications on a wide variety of mobile handsets.

Now, all eyes (or ears) should be on Microsoft, the only other “superpower” with the ability to define and refine speech-enabled user experience across platforms and modalities. With its own speech recognition “engine”, a dedicated speech app server farm called Tellme and some excellent “voice search” apps operating under the Bing brand, it has the potential to compete. But, as Greg Sterling noted in this post about the introduction of its new mobile operating system, it has definitely bestowed second-class status to its voice enabled services.