In a fascinating turn of events, it appears that IBM is amping up its efforts to provide a UC appliance to small businesses just as Microsoft has turned out the lights on its analogous product. IBM Lotus Foundations Reach (who names these things?) adds IP-based telephony, instant messaging, presence and several other collaboration tools to its Lotus Foundations Start appliance. In August the product will hit the market carrying a $70 per user price for existing customers of the Lotus Foundations “Start” appliance, which carries a street price of $229 per server and $149 per user for the software.

Almost on cue, this month marks the end of the line for Response Point, Microsoft’s shrink-wrapped, IP-based small business communications platform, terming it inconsistent with its overall Unified Communications strategy. Presumably this portends a packaging of Office Communications Server 2007 R2 (OCS) as a small business platform out-of-the box. It will require some re-jiggering of licensing terms and configuration scripts to make it as easy (and perhaps more affordable) to set up OCS, when compared to Response Point.

In the mean time, Microsoft has reportedly assured existing Response Point owners that they will continue to support the current version of the product.

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Tags: Microsoft, Recombinant Telephony, IBM, OCS