Microsoft releases unified communications products to manufacturing 9 August, 2007 By Patricia Pickett

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According to the Redmond, Wash. software giant, OCS 2007 and OC 2007, slated for launch in the fall, will provide capabilities such as presence, VoIP, Web conferencing and enterprise instant messaging (IM), and will work with Exchange 2007 and Office Outlook 2007 to streamline communications, collaboration and information access.

Basing the unified communications (UC) offerings on software will help the vendor achieve these goals, said Gurdeep Singh Pall, vice-president of the Microsoft UC group, in an online Q&A. "We believe all forms of enterprise communications, including VoIP, are moving from hardware-based systems to software," he said. "Over the last year, weve seen customers and partners increasingly validate our viewpoint and our strategy in this space. Even our competitors are validating this trend by trying to reshape their hardware-based businesses and investing heavily in software R&D," he said. In May, 12 vendors said they would support OCS by including its interoperability specifications in their own products.

Erin Elofson, unified communications and collaboration product manager for Microsoft Canada's information worker group, said it's a good time for Microsoft to be entering the unified communications (UC) marketplace, citing a 2005 study by research firm Gartner Inc. that predicts 40 per cent of companies will have completed the convergence of their voice and data networks by 2010. While there is a lot of excitement around UC these days, there are also many different ideas about how it should be defined. Elofson said that from Microsoft's perspective, UC includes a four big pillars: streamlining communications, increasing operational efficiency, providing built-in protection out of the box, and building future-ready foundation.

"The average information worker gets 51 messages a day in up to seven places," Elofson said. "That's time-consuming for employees and expensive for IT departments." Microsoft believes a standard UC platform that uses common tools will enable IT departments to increase efficiency and save money at the same time, she said.

Built-in protection is important in an age where spam is costing the world $50 billion in lost productivity and a significant percentage of e-mails are subpoenaed by courts, Elofson said, adding that OCS is secure and authenticated out of the box and IM conversations can be logged and archived.

Future-readiness means by "ensuring that software is at the core of the communication strategy to minimize the need for additional hardware investments," and provide the flexibility and agility to make changes as they are required, rather than having to wait for a hardware refresh cycle, she added.

One of the big challenges for customers is building a case for UC. To help with that, Microsoft field reps have created a return-on-investment (ROI) calculator that will help customers project how much they will get back from their OCS and OC deployments. The vendor also published a white paper that zeroes in on 13 different ROI areas. While ROI is dependent on the situation and the organization using the products, the calculator can provide a "solid benchmark across organizations...and a pretty good standard from which to work," Elofson said.

Partner opportunities are huge in the UC market, which is expected to reach $45.4 billion by 2010, including hardware and software, Elofson said. The UC services market, meanwhile, is expected to reach $4.7 billion in the next three years for upper-mid-market organizations with 500 or more PCs. "We believe that the services market opportunity is $125 dollars per seat," she said.

Aside from dollars, Microsoft sees four different partner opportunities: infrastructure and gateway partners; services partners that build and deliver on services and solutions, such as ISVs that extend the platform and add presence capability in business applications outside of the Office system; deployment partners that roll out UC; and hosting partners.

As with Live Communications Server, the OCS predecessor, customers will need both server and client access licenses (CALs). There are two types of OCS CALs: Standard and Enterprise. The Standard CAL has the IM and presence capabilities including group IM and rich presence features, and costs $21 for the average enterprise. The Enterprise CAL provides all of the new conferencing and VoIP call management features and costs $97. OCS Standard and Enterprise CALs will also come with the Microsoft Enterprise CAL Suite, a bundle of several Microsoft server CALs available at a discount.