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The most telling statistic I heard at last week’s official launch of Microsoft’s Office Communications Server 2007 was when Microsoft Business Division president Jeff Raikes announced that the OCS public beta had drawn 80,000 downloads and had an estimated 300,000 people using the trial version.

This number really brings home what’s at stake in this marketplace, and how Microsoft’s entry changes the game. Love Microsoft or hate them, it’s beyond question that no other company in our end of the industry, maybe in all of high-tech, could create a user base that large that quickly. Cisco is the unquestioned leader in networking, and Avaya is still the installed-base leader in voice systems, and yet you just can’t argue that they’d get a similar response if they tried a free public

beta of their unified communications software.

And that’s not just my opinion. It so happens that our upcoming November issue of Business Communications Review magazine will carry an article from Brent Kelly of Wainhouse Research, in which Brent describes the result of a Wainhouse survey of customer and vendor attitudes about UC.

What Wainhouse found is that Microsoft is the runaway mind-share winner when it comes to UC. Some specific results that Brent reports:

• For OCS 2007, a striking 11 percent of Wainhouse’s respondents said they were currently using this product—which had not, at the time of the survey, reached general availability yet. Assuming that these respondents were reporting their situations accurately, that goes a long way toward validating the above Microsoft claims about the public beta.
  In addition to these beta customers, another 37 percent of Wainhouse’s respondents said they were considering OCS, while 28 percent were not considering it.
• For Live Communications Server (LCS) 2005, Microsoft’s predecessor to OCS, 20 percent of Wainhouse’s respondents were currently users, 25 percent were considering it, and 31 percent were not considering it.
• In contrast, 18 percent of respondents were currently using Lotus Sametime, and just 6 percent more planned to implement it in the future, while a notable 51 percent said they weren’t considering Sametime.
• The UC packages from the IP-PBX players all garnered in the single digits of current adoption, and only Cisco’s Unified Personal Communicator (at 26 percent) and Avaya’s UC Suite (at 15 percent) registered in the double digits of users considering future adoption. For the “not considering” response, only Cisco (at 40 percent) and Avaya (at 46 percent) scored under 50 percent. (In addition to Cisco and Avaya, Wainhouse asked about UC products from Nortel, Siemens and Alcatel-Lucent.)

Brent notes that Cisco objected that you can’t be a user of a product (OCS) that wasn’t, at the time of the survey, a shipping product. Brent’s response was that real end users were simply reporting what they’re doing and planning, and that the survey dealt with UC products, not IP-PBXs.

Another thing in the survey that gave me pause is that a quarter of the respondents were considering LCS, the earlier-generation Microsoft product for IM and presence. That suggests that these users—as well as some unknown number of the OCS users and considerers—really do intend a limited role for Microsoft UC products, running alongside voice platforms, at least for the near future.

Microsoft seems to understand this reality, too. Microsoft chairman Bill Gates said at the announcement event that the transition to a software model for telephony “is an evolution….Over time, the lowest cost structure will be to not have the PBX,” he said, but added, “You don’t have to take it as one leap.”

This really circles us back to where I started. Nobody’s calling Microsoft the “Unified communications market leader,” for one simple reason: There is no unified communications market to speak of, yet. What Microsoft is, clearly, is the UC mind-share leader. And of course mind-share can erode a lot quicker than market share, if you can’t deliver.

Microsoft has officially delivered OCS. Now we’ll see if OCS delivers.

What do you think? Drop me a note here in the VoiceCon Enews Forum or directly at ekrapf@cmp.com

Eric H. Krapf
Editor, Business Communications Review
VoiceCon Program Chair

Posted in Unified Communications, Market Trends |

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