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Microsoft a VoIP player? I can already hear the bluescreen of death calling!

By Zeus Kerravala 13 Jul 2006 | SearchUnifiedCommunications.com News on networking, mobility and voice Digg This!     StumbleUpon     Del.icio.us

So, Microsoft has suddenly moved beyond desktop collaboration and into the VoIP space. In the process, the software behemoth is not worried about stepping on toes. Microsoft is willing to butt heads with the likes of Cisco and Avaya, VoIP market leaders and so-called Microsoft partners along the way.

Last month Microsoft had a big party and announced all of its product enhancements that make up its unified communications roadmap. Not to be too confusing, but its IP-based unified communications platform has been positioned as a subset of the previously launched unified collaboration suite. As expected, most of what Microsoft unleashed upon the world was in the area of desktop collaboration and integration with Exchange. Of interest was Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007, which has many functions including audio and Web conferencing services, presence information and most significantly, Microsoft's own call control. The call control is similar to Call Manager from Cisco or Communications Manager from Avaya. It's the IP PBX software used to deliver telephony services to companies. It's important to note that this was just an announced direction from Microsoft with the product not being actually available for purchase until sometime in 2007.

How business ready will Microsoft's products be when they're finally available?History is certainly not on Microsoft's side.  Zeus Kerravala  Vice President,  Yankee Group

Although Microsoft is entering the game as a very late participant, its existing market presence and monopoly on the desktop gives the company a degree of credibility in the collaboration space and, to some extent, to the VoIP market.

The big question now is, "How 'business ready' will Microsoft's products be when they're finally available? History is certainly not on Microsoft's side when contemplating this question.

Think back to other market entries Microsoft has made over the years. Software such as Active Directory, Proxy Server, Exchange and even Windows itself had stability problems coming out of the gate. After many versions, service packs, upgrades and patches, Microsoft eventually got it right, but the company put customers through a large amount of pain along the way. I've spoken with many engineers that spend much of their day deploying various types of Microsoft software then subsequently applying fixes, patching and tuning the products to get them to a stable condition.

The "blue screen of death" and rebooting have sadly become part of every day life. I can't imagine applying the same principles to an enterprise voice system. Telephony has always been a mission critical application and the reliability of it has always been high—no matter whether you've had power to your desk, whether the network is up or down, the phone system has always been available. Do we really want to mess with that?

So past performance gives me no reason to assume that Microsoft is going to release an enterprise class IP PBX out of the chute.

Read more on Microsoft's Unified Communications roadmap.

I am also skeptical in that many other vendors that have entered the voice market such as Cisco and 3Com initially underestimated the complexity of delivering voice. It's not just the call control capabilities at issue, but there are problems surrounding around redundancy and failover capabilities; reliability; distribution to remote offices; and the hundreds of features that are built into both the traditional and IP-based voice systems. This has taken the other vendors years to build into their platforms and it will be no different for Microsoft.

The "blue screen of death" and rebooting have sadly become part of every day life.  I can't imagine applying the same principles to an enterprise voice system.

Yet another area that should cause customers some concern with Microsoft's role in VoIP and unified collaboration is, ironically, Microsoft's inability or unwillingness to collaborate. Microsoft has many technology "partners" in this area, many of which also compete with Microsoft. After the launch of unified communications, the competition will only increase. The concept of "unified collaboration" is to unify collaboration tools from multiple vendors, creating a seamless user experience rather than having it only work from a single vendor.

Publicly, Microsoft and its partners all hail the great collaborative efforts from the software giant, but behind closed doors many of them have expressed frustration in trying to create real value for its customers. An example of this is presence information. Currently every vendor has its own presence manager which interoperates with its own equipment. It can tell you whether a user is on the phone, available on instant messenger, away from their desk, etc. Little of this information works cross vendor.

Almost every vendor will espouse the value of federated presence information where a single presence client can integrate with multiple vendors products. Because of Microsoft's desktop dominance, Office Communicator (Microsoft's client) will be one of the top choices for a corporate wide presence manager. This is far more desirable to the alternative of having multiple clients from the various vendors. As of now, Microsoft has only federated with the public IM vendors Yahoo, AOL and MSN who pose no threat to them in the corporate collaboration space. When asked about federation with the likes of Cisco and Avaya the answer I get is that Microsoft understands it's important and it's on the roadmap. I'll believe it when I see it.

In summary I'll wrap up with two messages.

To Microsoft, it's great seeing you enter this market. No one understands user experience and desktops like you do but please collaborate better and federate information. That will help drive innovation in the market much faster than all the vendors going it alone.

To all of you considering Microsoft as a VoIP vendor, go in with your eyes wide open. Be prepared for the normal onslaught of services packs and hot fixes and then months of tuning. Realistically it will take Microsoft a few years to get VoIP to the point of being enterprise ready. In the mean time, push Microsoft into federating information with the other vendors. This will allow you to deploy someone like Cisco or Avaya today and then integrate Microsoft in the future.

Anyway, I need to go reboot my laptop now…

Zeus Kerravala manages Yankee Group's infrastructure research and consulting. His areas of expertise involve working with customers to solve their business issues through the deployment of infrastructure technology solutions, including switching, routing, network management, voice solutions and VPNs.

Before joining Yankee Group, Kerravala was a senior engineer and technical project manager for Greenwich Technology Partners, a leading network infrastructure and engineering consulting firm. Prior to that, he was a vice president of IT for Ferris, Baker Watts, a mid-Atlantic based brokerage firm, acting as both a lead engineer and project manager deploying corporate-wide technical solutions to support the firm's business units. Kerravala's first task at FBW was to roll out a new frame relay infrastructure with connections to branch offices, service providers, vendors and the stock exchange. Kerravala was also an engineer and technical project manager for Alex. Brown & Sons, responsible for the technology related to the equity trading desks.

Kerravala obtained a B.S. degree in physics and mathematics from the University of Victoria (Canada). He is also certified by Citrix and NetScout.

Tags: IP Telephony Systems,  VoIP Implementation,  Unified Messaging,  Contact Management,  Collaboration and Social Software,  VIEW ALL TAGS

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