Both Microsoft and Cisco held milestone events for their flagship communications and collaboration offerings this week. In New York City, Microsoft held the much anticipated launch event for Lync 2010, the revamped and rebranded update of Office Communications Server 2007 R2 (OCS) (incorporating a single client to support the functions of Office Communicator and LiveMeeting). I wrote about the build-up to the Lync 2010 here.

Meanwhile, at the posh Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix, Cisco held its second Collaboration Summit featuring major updates and extensions of the resources that support both intra- and inter-company collaboration, as well as collaborative customer care. The Twittersphere was also alive with comments from the Defrag Conference in Denver, and tweets surrounding a variety of talks about generation, control and filtering of streams of BIG DATA provided a counterpoint to presentations of enterprise infrastructure, architecture, software and services that encourage collaboration, communications and conferencing.

In Cisco’s case, the day-and-a-half of briefings on architectural pillars, product descriptions, strategy discussions, customer testimonials and demonstrations, provided vivid pictures of usecases for the rapidly maturing line of core technologies – including social platform and IU associated with Quad, the inter-company communications support of IME, the Android-based Cius tablet, and the virtual desktop. Collectively they provide Cisco customers and partners solutions that leverage the core functional elements: Interoperable Open Architecture, Flexible Deployment Models, Enterprise Social Software, Pervasive Video and Secure Intercompany Communications.

I’ll be issuing an advisory next week with more details on the contrasting approaches being taken by Microsoft and Cisco. My top-line thoughts follow:

For customers and technology partners looking for Microsoft to fulfill on its promises surrounding Lync to facilitate PBX replacement, the company does not disappoint. For those looking for a UI (user interface) that supports multimedia messaging and conferencing, Microsoft Lync delivers those goods as well. Indeed, if you are a customer that is steeped in the server-side architecture where Active Directory houses the company directory, Exchange is the core of email and messaging and Office applications are the foundation of productivity, Lync is your glue.

Cisco’s approach puts much more emphasis on the rapid arrival of “pervasive video” as the model for interpersonal and intercompany communications. It will require some retooling of the way that broadband media streams are managed from endpoint-to-endpoint, but Cisco and partners are working on many of the answers there. Another point of major departure revolves around the contact center, where Cisco has a vision that embraces social networks (with Socialminer), Capture and analytics and a new desktop (Finesse) that serves as a “container” for all sorts of agent and supervisor apps and instances. By contrast, Microsoft will depend partners, led by Aspect, InteractiveIntelligence and PrairieFyre to deliver on contact center functionality.

The implications and promises of the two approaches are the core subject of my forthcoming advisory.

Categories: Articles

Tags: Microsoft, Cisco, IP telephony, Contact Center, Collaboration, Recombinant Communications