A Cooperative Project of VoiceCon and UC Strategies

This issue of VoiceCon UC eWeekly is sponsored by Nortel:

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It’s not yet spring, but the Unified Communications neighborhood is blossoming with announcements and new things to see at VoiceCon Orlando 2008, which starts less than two weeks from now. There’ve been three big announcements just this week from Siemens, Microsoft and Cisco.

Siemens Enterprise Networks made a big move by introducing the new OpenScape Unified Communications Server. This software package provides a complete, SIP-based communications platform that can interoperate with any existing telephony or IT environment. This platform supports the new Version 3.0 of the proven Siemens OpenScape UC application, providing a rich personal communications management tool. It also works with the OpenScape Voice Application, a new version of the HiPath 8000 software, and with the OpenScape Video Portfolio, which includes High-Definition (HD) cameras, speakerphones and displays.

Siemens continues to emphasize the openness of its solution both for customer use in a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and as the enabler of interoperation with Microsoft’s Office applications, IBM’s Lotus applications and numerous other enterprise application packages. All this is available in Medium Edition for under 1,000 users, Large Edition with up to 100,000 voice users and 20,000 advanced UC users, and Hosted Edition for flexible consumption up to the Large Edition scale. Per user pricing is very attractive, with list prices ranging from $73/user for the basic package to $202/user for the complete suite of UC functionality. (Note the alignment with industry pricing trends described in a recent post on NoJitter.com.)

Several highlights jump out. First, Siemens has made it possible to buy an enterprise-wide UC solution made by a proven communications systems company, yet independent of the existing infrastructure. Second, it is offering a software-based solution as both an on-premise and hosted solution through major providers. In other words, Siemens has made adoption of a high-quality UC solution as easy as possible.

The hosting trend was underlined by Microsoft’s announcement that the Microsoft On-line Services formerly available to organizations with 5,000 or more users are now available in hosted format for organizations of all sizes. At the annual SharePoint Conference, Bill Gates announced, “With Microsoft Online Services, businesses can deploy software as a subscription service, from servers they manage on-site, or a combination of the two, depending on their specific needs.”

The expanded offering includes Microsoft Exchange 2007, Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007 and the previously available Microsoft Office Live Meeting. These three, as well as Microsoft Office Communications Online, continue to be available to larger organizations.

Again, this makes adoption of Unified Communications, including the Live Meeting conferencing and SharePoint collaboration tools, very easy, either as a hosted or in-house combination of services.

Cisco’s announcement is really a UC enabler. The new Cisco Aggregation Services Router 1000 (ASR 1000) is built on a blazingly fast Cisco-designed QuantumFlow processor, that contains forty (yes, 40) cores and 1.3 billion transistors. All of that processing speed can be harnessed to support “Unified WAN Services.”

The router supports throughput of 5–20 Gbps, while also supporting services that previously required external appliances or other units, including Integrated Security (line-rate encryption and embedded VPNs), Application Intelligence (bandwidth management, QOS, application optimization), and Non-Stop Communications. The latter is impressive, as Cisco is offering either virtual machine software redundancy or hardware redundancy for instant failover and on-the-fly software upgrades and application module enablement.

Cisco emphasized that its new router will significantly ease deployment and operation of high-performance, multi-application enterprise WANs, which sure sounds like a UC environment to me. Of course, this would lower the costs of both acquisition (i.e., fewer separate systems or appliances) and ownership, including the point that the ASR 1000 would cut power consumption by over 50%. Connectivity to distributed sites and branch offices also was a major point of emphasis.

All of these new offerings, and I’m sure many more, will be on display at VoiceCon Orlando 2008. I hope you will be there and, in the meantime, I’d like to know what you think about these new announcements and progress in the UC scene. Drop me a note at mparker@UniCommConsulting.com or post your comments here in the VoiceCon Unified Communications eWeekly forum.

Marty Parker
Principal, UniComm Consulting

Posted in Market Trends, Equipment, Marty Parker, Unified Communications |

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