Cisco - Microsoft Thoughts

This morning Charlie Rose hosted a discussion between Cisco's John Chambers and Microsoft's Steve Ballmer.  There have been a few news stories already, but to be honest I didn't hear anything all that earth shattering.  Both men reinforced that they would continue to build integration between their products in the unified communications space, though they didn't announce any deep or formal partnerships along the lines of the Nortel-Microsoft Innovative Communications Alliance.

These sorts of events certainly help assuage enterprises who are concerned that their Cisco phone systems won't fully integrate presence and application access with their Microsoft LCS/OCS presence/collaboration systems, but again I don't think there's anything really all that new here.  Microsoft and Cisco previously announced integration for click-to-call and presence awareness functionality, but they are also increasingly competing with one another for enterprise communications and collaboration services. 

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[John Earnhardt]

You can watch today's conversation between Cisco CEO John Chambers and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, as well as view a joint Q&A, the principles for the partnership and more at http://newsroom.cisco.com.