Microsoft designing VOIP Solution Software

When SunRocket went down (seriously, I’m obsessed with this now), there was a lot of speculation by ‘experts’ and ‘analysts’ about how the company’s bankruptcy could spell doom for the VoIP market, and how it could frighten possible future players away. Now usually, it takes a little while – a few months or so – for these alleged ‘experts’ to be proved wrong, and by that time, everybody’s even forgotten what they said. This time around however, the ‘highly qualified analysts’ have struck out in a mere two weeks – Microsoft is all set to enter the VoIP market, and it’s planning to enter in a big way.

Office Communications Server 2007 and the Office Communicator – the much hyped, much talked about, much anticipated software based VoIP solution – are now code complete.

In case you were living in a cave these previous months, Microsoft had decided to enter the VoIP market and was in the process of developing a completely software based VoIP solution. They are currently promoting it via a ad campaign

"We’re one step close to delivering the products that will establish Microsoft as a major force in communications," said Jeff Raikes – President of Microsoft’s Business Division – at the vendor’s annual analyst meeting. Office Communications Server 2007 – in public beta since March – is entirely software based, thus promising to bring VoIP telephony, instant messaging and conferencing under a single PC-focused umbrella. OCS 2007 uses Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), allowing for greater interoperability with different VoIP vendors, thus resulting in superior cost savings and broader functionality. Microsoft expects to help organizations cut their enterprise telephony costs to half with its solution.

Customers are truly seeing the magic of software in this instance, Raikes said. They see they will get more capabilities at less cost than the traditional approaches of any of the existing players.

Commenting on the same, Jay Lendl, Vice-President of Microsoft Services at Granite Pointe Partners – a Minnesota based solution provider – said that the interest in OCS 2007 for most customers would be because of its integration with Microsoft Exchange Server 2007.

It's important to have a single view of the internal teams and people that you work with, and have presence be a part of collaboration, whether it's through text, speech, video conferencing.” He added.

All very well, and all very good. In just a couple of months, we’ll have yet another VoIP player in the market – always a good thing for us customers. And since it will be a BIG player, it will be even BETTER for us customers. Let’s just hope that when Microsoft’s solution falls in fall, it doesn’t actually fall.

A quick note from Vinay- I myself have been using Microsoft Communicator for internal office communication. I found it more stable and it integrates nicely with Outlook, so keeping track of Nortel voicemails is very easy. The best feature is perhaps integrating it with other click to call software such as corebridge. I am using corebridge via Nortel API to make Calls without dialing a number. It works all great.

This article is written by Samarth Chandola, our full time VOIP news editor.