A Cooperative Project of VoiceCon and UC Strategies

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At VoiceCon Spring 2007 in Orlando, Microsoft announced an interface to its upcoming Office Communications Server (OCS) due out this summer, which will allow just about any PBX—TDM or IP—to be part of a Microsoft UC solution. For now, instead of replacing existing PBXs/IP-PBXs as some had feared and predicted, Microsoft intends to peacefully coexist.

That suits most customers—and all of the PBX/IP-PBX vendors—just fine. Legitimate concerns have been expressed regarding Microsoft’s ability to offer a reliable, resilient and scalable call control product offering out of the gate. Many enterprises believe that the product doesn’t have the features required, and they’re not ready to discard the PBX in favor of an unknown, unproven technology.

Still, some enterprises have committed to deploying Microsoft’s soon to be released OCS in departments and workgroups that require a lot of communications and collaboration. But while call control is part of OCS, it only supports a handful of basic SIP features; it does not support the hundreds of features provided by today’s PBX and IP-PBX solutions.

Microsoft is many things, but stupid is not one of them, and so for now, it envisions that OCS will sit side by side with the enterprise switch environment. In short, it has adopted a “Trojan Horse” strategy: Microsoft is betting that enterprises will move to the first release of OCS because of its Unified Communications capabilities—presence, IM and point-and-click capabilities to set up a voice, web or video conference. Microsoft reasons that once the UC functionality is used and as more call control features are added, enterprise customers will opt for its call control when the time comes to get rid of their existing PBX.

OCS will work with an enterprise’s existing PBX/IP-PBX; the PBX/IP-PBX will become a feature server providing call control features to other applications—e.g., click-to-call from within an application. But, when the time comes to replace its PBX/IP-PBX, the enterprise can use OCS’s call-control capabilities and, of course, its UC capabilities as well. Microsoft is using the interface to PBXs/IP-PBXs as its Trojan Horse to get inside the communications “gates;” the OCS features and functions act as a beachhead from which it can expand its presence. Since it is not driven by next quarter’s earnings call, Microsoft can afford to wait.

Both enterprise customers and existing PBX vendors benefit from this strategy. Enterprises can leverage Microsoft’s UC offering with their existing PBXs or a new IP-PBX. PBX/IP-PBX vendors can retain their existing customer base and a reasonable portion of their sales while enterprises begin implementing a UC strategy. For the PBX/IP-PBX vendors, Microsoft’s Trojan Horse strategy is actually a blessing in disguise: It gives them more time to develop their war plans.

What do you think? Drop me a note at jburton@ctlink.com or post your comments here in the VoiceCon Unified Communications eWeekly forum.

Jim Burton
CT-Link and UCStrategies.com

Posted in Market Trends, Architecture, Jim Burton, Unified Communications |

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