Mike Gotta of Burton Group gives his view on the recently announced Unified Communications Tools for Developers.
As you may know the ‘partner eco system’ (ISV’s Developers, SI’s, Telephony vendors, etc) is vital in Microsoft’s approach. These tool will speed up the process of integration, optimisation and development of new functionality …
…. How credible is Microsoft’s position in the unified communications space?
Very credible but it has different areas of competency that are at different levels of maturity. Microsoft’s core strengths are in the real-time collaboration re: IM, presence, web conferencing. They are rapidly moving into the area traditionally dominated by communication vendors – VoIP/IP Telephony, audio/video conferencing. But right now, I believe most organizations are going to deploy OCS and “get stable” around the real-time collaboration capabilities, then move to VoIP and integration with existing communication vendors as driven by business requirements. I don’t see anyone ripping out their existing IP-PBX infrastructure in the short run. I do expect more rapid adoption of Round Table however given its price point, form factor and integration with Live Meeting. But make no mistake, Microsoft is in the UC game for the long run and fully intends to dominate it from a platform perspective – that includes mobile and speech as a standard application interaction model.
Who is the typical “developer” they’re targeting for this stuff?
Different segments – Microsoft wants to make it easy for the average developer to UC-enable productivity applications, deliver deeper, more complex UC-centric systems and extend the modality of applications with speech interfaces – so I really think it is across the board – from the historical “VB”-like developer to the IT Pro who might be developing at a core infrastructure level. …
Source: Microsoft Introduces Unified Communications Tools for Developers
Author: Mike Gotta
Date Published: Fri, 30 Nov 2007
