Microsoft champions unified communications

Microsoft made a concerted advance into Cisco and Avaya's enterprise telephony territory this week with the unveiling of its Office Communications Server 14, which combines voice-over-IP, instant messaging and conferencing capabilities. In a blog post Wednesday, Gurdeep Singh Pall, corporate VP of Microsoft's Unified Communications Group, offered some pretty ambitious predictions for converged communications.

In Microsoft's vision, traditional, hardware-dependent desk phone systems soon will be supplanted by software-based systems running on laptop PCs and mobile devices capable of delivering a variety of traffic at once. The vision rests on a growing demand for collaborative capabilities over portable devices. 

"In the next three years, we predict that UC will become the norm in business communications, more than half of VoIP calls at work will include more than just voice, and your communications client will enable UC with more than 1 billion people," Pall wrote.

Two of the industry's closest Microsoft watchers point out that the Redmond, Wash., software giant has been banging this drum for several years already. CNET's Ina Fried notes that it was back in 2006 that Microsoft started touting converged communications when it said it was going to get into the business of enterprise telephony.

Mary Foley at ZDNet compared Pall's prediction to the "This is the year of IPTV" predictions, noting that technologies tend to take root several years after market participants expect. However, Foley reports that according to Microsoft, businesses using Office Communications Server today are in some pretty impressive company, including nine of the top 10 banks and seven of the top 10 drug companies.

For more:
- see Gurdeep Singh Pall's post
- see Mary Foley's post
- see Ina Fried's post

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