In declaring Monday, June 26, “Unified Communications Strategy Day,” Microsoft, along with partners, laid out its vision for filling out the solution stack for enterprise IP-telephony. The software giant held an event in San Francisco where top executives demonstrated new software and hardware components that round out the Unified Communications (UC) solutions stack and, to use Bill Gates’ terminology, “make it easy for people to reach each other using the mode of communication that is the most productive, on the device that is most convenient.”

Here are the guts of Microsoft’s announcement: In conjunction with LG-Nortel, Polycom and Thomson Telecom (based in Australia, not France), the software giant will make it easy for enterprise customers to move their voice traffic to IP-based networks. From the end-user’s point of view, a simple mouse click will be all it takes to make a phone call or initiate a conference call. Other members of its hardware consortium include Motorola, Samsung, Plantronics, Tatung, Logitech and Siemens.

Just to show what it’s capable of in the real world, according to an article in the June 27th Wall Street Journal, Microsoft is already piloting its newfound power to serve as a phone company in the Philippines. There, it’s using its software to allow Filipinos overseas to speak to their families throughout the world using either VoIP or WiFi. It would also like to use Microsoft’s communications backbone to enable overseas workers to send their earnings home using a Windows Mobile 5.0 device.

Rather than highlighting new and existing hardware partners, Opus Research would like to see how Microsoft will integrate speech and call processing to fulfill users’ demands for more efficient connections and commerce.

Cutting Through Corporate Chaos
And just to show how fickle and chaotic the enterprise infrastructure market is, the trade press portrays Microsoft’s move as a direct assault on switch and router makers as well as providers of (in alphabetical order) Alcatel, Avaya, Cisco, IBM, Nortel and Siemens. Readers who have paid attention to the UC marketplace thus far can see that three out of five of these companies are solid partners of Microsoft in UC projects past and present. In fact, a long-standing Microsoft/Avaya venture is the granddaddy of all sales efforts in the ‘unified messaging’ business.

Siemens was already on Microsoft’s short list of enterprise switching providers that had tuned their IP-PBXs to support Communicator and the Live Communications Server (LCS2005). Alcatel’s Genesys subsidiary launched its joint development effort with Microsoft in February 2005 and began offering an LCS2005 compatible version of GETS (Genesys Enterprise Telephony Software) for nearly a year. Nortel would be the odd man out save for its joint venture with Korean phone manufacturer LG that has offered alternatives to the IP telephones from Cisco, Alcatel, Avaya and others.

The foray into voice telecom is much more than repackaging existing initiatives. Wall Street analysts noted in the company’s latest disclosures that operating expenses are forecast to run something like $2 billion above past years’ norms. While financial forecasting is designed to disguise a multitude of issues, a large percentage of that increase is earmarked for “Communications” according to company spokespeople.

The More the Merrier
Microsoft is not alone in refreshing efforts to attract more corporate spending on real-time, IP-based communications and collaboration in the enterprise. June 26 also turned out to be the day that IBM announced some major changes to SameTime, which battles neck-and-neck with Microsoft’s Live Communications Server (LCS) for share of the real-time collaboration software market. The most salient enhancements to SameTime, as it moves to rev 7.5, will be the ability to launch its features from Microsoft Office, Microsoft SharePoint, and the Microsoft’s Outlook e-mail client. IBM also announced a broader roster of mobile devices to support the SameTime client, including RIM, Nokia and Windows Mobile devices. IBM’s enhancements will be available later this year.

IBM will be joined by Avaya, Oracle and Cisco as each tries to sort out whether to position their software “behind” the Microsoft desktop or “against” Microsoft by displacing the Communicator client from desktops, laptops and smartphones. [Hint: As IBM’s strategy indicates, the core application programming interface (API) that underlies Microsoft’s UC solutions is ASP.net and it has proven to be a very stable and well-documented set of interfaces.] Infrastructure providers are well-advised to work “with” rather than “against” Microsoft in the battle for the desktop. And there’s never been a better time to support the cause of real-time communications as Microsoft prepares to step up its spending in development by more than a billion dollars each year.

Life-Death-Infinity-Vocalocity
Several small players are poised to make a splash in the enterprise IP telephony space. Opus Research noted just two months ago that Microsoft was signaling a new era of openness by licensing the Open Source version of a VoiceXML browser (OpenVXI) from Vocalocity. A few weeks later, the Atlanta-based VoiceXML OEM specialist was forced by investors to seek new owners.

Today, a small firm specializing in hosted VoIP, ZivVa by name, stepped forward as Vocalocity’s new owner. Oddly enough, ZivVa has its sights trained on the same market as Microsoft’s multi-billion IP-telephony initiative. It’s aimed at eliminating the need for businesses to own their own telephone equipment. In ZivVa’s case, the answer is a hosted IP-PBX. Vocalocity’s software will be baked into the service to facilitate development and deployment of voice self-service applications on a hosted IP-based call processing system.

As this note indicates, Microsoft’s announcement has little to do with new products or new alliances and everything to do with legitimizing multivendor IP-based telephony solutions in companies that have already bought into ASP.net as their preferred middleware. It’s a land grab that encompasses hardware and software. Microsoft has its competitive sights trained on alternative telecom infrastructure providers, including Avaya, Cisco and Alcatel and others. Yet opportunistic firms like ZivVa (not to mention larger middleware and solutions providers like IBM, Oracle and BEA) stand to gain from simplifying purchase decisions and migration strategies. Their efforts will be effective only if they are able to knit together solutions that make the purchase of hardware, software and applications simple and affordable.

Microsoft’s new Unified Communications umbrella may define an expanded solutions stack, but it hasn’t completed the circle by demonstrating new functionality or compelling business value.

Categories: Articles