Microsoft: The next AT&T?

Company unveils its unified communications platform, vies for “21st century dial tone” dominance

With Chairman Bill Gates and President Jeff Raikes standing by, Microsoft will unveil OCS (Office Communicators Server) 2007 for the back end and Office Communicator 2007 for the client side. Essentially an upgrade to LCS (Live Communications Server), OCS will provide a platform for IM, voice conferencing, videoconferencing, and presence.

Exchange 2007 delivers messaging, calendaring, mobile e-mail, and voicemail capabilities to round out Microsoft’s two-component UC vision.

Of course, no announcement would be complete without a parade of partner and customer testimonials. Expect them to be 100 percent ga-ga over the platform.

According to Kim Akers, unified communications general manager at Microsoft, the two most important UC components are presence and identity.

Some analysts, however, believe the spotlight should be narrowed, singling out presence as the star of the show.

Whereas identity manages access rights, presence gives users insight into others’ availability. And it is this dynamic capability that many analysts feel will quickly become a critical element of any workflow that requires human intervention.

What’s behind the enthusiasm over presence? The answer comes from Akers: “Presence detection can be embedded into the business logic of the workflow.”

That way, if any one of five people has signoff privileges at a given stage in a chain of events, a business rule based on presence could find out whether any of the five is currently available to move the process along, thereby avoiding long delays.

Brent Kelly, senior analyst at Wainhouse Research, calls presence the “dial tone of the 21st century.”

In other words, presence, not the dial tone, is what we will use to contact people. If you like, you can call it an “intelligent” dial tone.

Instead of trying to call a colleague, hoping you can reach them, presence will tell you when he or she is available and whether they are at their desktop or on a mobile device.

“He who owns the presence technology will own the rest of the solutions platform, or at least have a major influence over it,” Kelly says.

And this is where competing UC technologies play a major role, as each of the three major players — Microsoft, Cisco, and IBM — has its own presence solution.

Microsoft believes a server-centric model offers the most cost-effective platform. Cisco is betting that a network-centric solution will help it sell enterprises lots of hardware.

IBM, in the meantime, is proposing a bit of a hybrid. Its Sametime is software-centric but differs from Microsoft’s solution in two distinct ways.

First, IBM has partnered with both Cisco and Siemens to tap their networking hardware. Second, IBM has based Sametime on the Eclipse development platform.

According to Wainhouse’s Kelly, Eclipse offers developers a better development environment than Microsoft does. Because its code is open source, ISVs and corporate developers can do more with the platform.

“From developers I have spoken with, it is easier to integrate with Sametime than with Microsoft,” Kelly notes.

Moreover, because Microsoft puts the intelligence in the server rather than the network, it puts companies at risk of losing local capabilities in the event that the central system goes down.

Jamie Stark, technical product manager for the Unified Communications Group at Microsoft, counters that OCS can be structured so that “if any single server role goes down or becomes unavailable, the request would fall to a secondary server. If critical components like mediation servers, gateways, and front ends go down, users will not experience broad disruption, as the functions will be taken on by other servers in the pool.”

Cisco, on the other hand, builds redundancy into the local switch so that if the Cisco communication manager goes down at a central point, users will still be able to call locally and perhaps even call out.

Stark’s defense aside, Wainhouse’s Kelly says that Microsoft is aware of the local usability problem and has promised to fix it by next year.

In any event, Microsoft claims its server-based solution is more cost-effective than competing UC solutions, mainly due to its ability to increase IT productivity.

Up until now, communications infrastructures have remained separate, meaning that companies have to had to manage multiple directories to provision a user. While it is true that nowadays directories can exchange information, each directory still has to be managed by someone with domain expertise in a particular communications area.

By basing its UC infrastructure on AD (Active Directory), Microsoft believes it has put an end to the need for that kind of specialization.

“You don’t have to have different people to maintain many sets of infrastructures. It is all built on AD,” Microsoft’s Akers says.

Of course, because Microsoft owns the productivity application space, integration here will also be very handy. Roll your mouse over a name in a Word document and a pop-up window will tell you whether the person is available. Click on the name and the system will ask whether you want to IM, conference in, dial out, or e-mail the person.

IBM Sametime has an equivalent solution for Microsoft Office. The company last week announced it will do the same for Symphony, its own productivity suite.

If you thought Microsoft’s ownership of the desktop was big, think about this: Whoever owns the UC platform will in essence become in this century what AT&T was in the last.

UC could be even bigger than Windows, IBM Global Services, and Cisco’s routers and switches all rolled into one.