Microsoft Unleashes Office Communications Server
Microsoft Unleashes Office Communications Server
October 18, 2007: In a major announcement, and one that will no doubt put it into an interesting showdown with the likes of Cisco, Microsoft has come out and finally launched its Office Communications Server, making a strong play for a large chunk of business telephony.
Released on Tuesday in San Francisco by company chairman Bill Gates, the new bit of kit is aimed at unifying email, instant messaging, voice mail and telephony, and helping to reduce the cost of the average corporate voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) system by half.
Office Communications Server 2007, which is itself a significant expansion of the company’s Live Communications Server, is the largest part of Microsoft’s new communications push, bringing together VoIP, video, instant messaging, conferencing and presence and delivering them within applications such as Microsoft Office and future incarnations of Microsoft Dynamics.
Along with Office Communications Server, the company has released Office Communicator, client-side software for phone, instant messaging and video communications that the Microsoft claims will work across the PC, mobile phone and Web browser.
To cap off the release party Microsoft also unveiled an update to its Live Meeting videoconferencing software, a new RoundTable videoconferencing device with a 360-degree camera and recording abilities, and a service pack for Exchange Server 2007.
During his release keynote, Gates likened office telephony to the computer industry before the personal computer came along, saying that the market is “its own world, untouched by the power of software.”
“In the next decade, sweeping technology innovations driven by the power of software will transform communications,” he said.
Both Gates and Jeff Raikes, president of the Microsoft Business Division, believe that the future lies in marrying telephony with software and office applications.
“Unified communications software will transform business communications as fundamentally as e-mail did in the 1990s,” said Jeff Raikes. “Today, Microsoft is in the VoIP game, and our customers and partners are already winning with better economics and new business opportunities.”
They sound like fighting words, and while Microsoft is no lightweight, as it squaring up to lions like Cisco in their own territory it could be in for quite a battle.
Comment on this story