Microsoftis planning to offer unified
communications on an on-demand basis.
Unified communications allow voice, video and data inside a
multitude of applications to pass through a single delivery system
to allow employees to communicate more easily using desktops,
phones and mobile devices.
At this week's
VoiceCon conference in San Francisco, Warren Barkley, a group
programme manager at Microsoft, told attendees that Microsoft was
aiming to offer unified comms as a service offering.
Such an offering would be ideal, he said, for widely distributed
smaller businesses that did not have the resources or manpower to
set up a central unified comms platform. No timeline has so far
been put on the service offering by Microsoft.
Despite the plans, Microsoft is still committed to the centrally
deployed enterprise unified comms hub market. This week also saw
Microsoft confirm the 16 October launch date of its main unified
comms hub Office Communications Server 2007.
According to analyst Infonetics Research, worldwide sales of
unified comms products increased 21% between 2005 and 2006,
reaching £191m.
Avaya is the leader in the worldwide unified messaging market
by sales, said Infonetics. But its top competitors, including
Nortel, Cisco and Alcatel-Lucent (in that order), are gaining fast,
said the analyst.
Nortel has been instrumental in helping Microsoft to build
Office Communications Server 2007.