You missed one political situation, Developers.

Re: The political side of unified communications.

When you through in things like Interactive Voice, Contact Center Routing you begin to deal with, not only the manufacturers administrative tools, but also development tools; such as VoiceXML, XML, VB, etc. For those with a "developer" center IS Executive or strong developer group, they will tell you they need to own it (even if they don't have a clue what VoiceXML is) as it is "development" oriented architecture.

Now who do you think Microsoft is targeting with their Speechserver, OCS and any other name it comes under? The "we love to develop in Microsoft" crowd or the "we actually talk to people and make decisions on communications" crowd? For the Development crowd of course (even Microsoft has stated this as their target as the IS sweet spot in every company). What are you gonna do when you get the Blue Screen on your phone during that conference call with the Board of Directors?