Om Malik recently addressed the potential of Microsoft and Cisco becoming competitors in the enterprise VoIP space (See: Will Cisco & Microsoft Butt Heads on VoIP?). Om writes "It is only a matter of time when Microsoft’s VoIP dreams come in the way of Cisco’s desire to be the king of enterprise VoIP."
Many of the enterprises I speak with are wondering the same thing. For the last few years Cisco has arguably owned corporate "mindshare" when it comes to VoIP. Cisco has done a tremendous job convincing enterprises of the value of migrating to VoIP and for most enterprises VoIP is no longer a matter of if, but when (though "how" is still not settled as Cisco faces stiff competition from Avaya, Siemens, Nortel, Alcatel and many others).
With Microsoft's recent announcement of an improved LCS coupled with Windows Communicator (formerly known as "Istanbul"), Microsoft now plants itself firmly into the enterprise communications space. The battle now is for the interface. Will users access telephony and collaboration features through a desktop client, or through their phone. And if it is a desktop client, will third party clients be able to compete with Microsoft which will increasingly embed telephony interfaces into all of its Office applications as well as its collaborative environment (and let us not forget Lotus/IBM as well as Oracle which have similar plans to embed real-time communications capabilities into collaborative environments such as Notes.
As Microsoft rolls forward with its plans, the question is not just where does this leave Cisco, but all other VoIP systems vendors as well. Will VoIP phones just become a subset of a greater communications infrastructure, with features being controlled by a client embedded into business and office applications? Or will there still be an opportunity for phone system vendors to introduce phone-based features, as well as their own clients that can tie into corporate messaging, calendaring, and presence systems? Some vendors, such as Mitel, Broadsoft, and Siemens, have been aggressive in pursuing partnerships with Microsoft that will enable their telephony platforms to provide backend feature services to LCS-based systems, providing the telephony intelligence that Microsoft currently lacks. But the challenge for these partners is to avoid simply being a commodity that can easily be replaced.
It seems obvious that Microsoft will enter a period of "co-opitition" with its rivals in the communications space (such as Cisco). Enterprises that are heavily investing in IP telephony systems aren't going to just discard them to embrace LCS. Rather, enterprises will (and should) put pressure on Microsoft & Cisco (as well as Avaya, Nortel, Alcatel, etc..) to work closely to allow integration of systems so that enterprises will not have to choose a single telephony interface, but instead can enable interconnection of multiple systems that will provide the flexibility to deliver what ever solution makes sense for a particular group of end users.
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