Microsoft is slightly leading Cisco on UC products but the whole market needs interoperability

Infonetics Research recently completed a survey of 80 North American companies that had implemented unified messaging to see what plans they had to go for the whole enchilada and rollout unified communications. The study found that the market is in the midst of a battle of the titans, with Cisco and Microsoft fighting for the lead and Microsoft slightly ahead. The study, "User Plans for Unified Communications: North America 2008," attempts to determine the market potential and product requirements. Buyer's rated five UC vendors -- Avaya, Cisco, IBM, Microsoft, and Nortel -- on a number of criteria, including reliability, value, pricing, features, innovation, integration with third party vendors, and financial stability.

No clear winner emerged. Cisco rated high on reliability but low on pricing. Microsoft rated high on financial stability but low on reliability. Almost all vendors were given a thump on the head over interoperability -- indicating that this area could use some serious improvements before UC will be adopted by the masses. Because this study focused only on companies that were already on the UC path, 80% of them had adopted a unified messaging client (in UC lingo, like Star Trek lingo, this is called a communicator). Matthias Machowinski, Infonetics Directing Analyst, Enterprise Voice and Data, answered a few questions on the study for Cisco Subnet via e-mail.

Cisco Subnet: Can you give us breakdown ... how many companies in the study have the Cisco client, how many have the Microsoft communicator and how many have another?

Machowinski: 1/4 have MS, 1/5 have CSCO, 1/7 Avaya.

Cisco Subnet: Where is the battle taking place?

Machowinski: On the front end, and that's where Microsoft is seeing success. But they're not winning all the time (see vendors share above) - it's still split between MS and the telephony vendors.

Cisco Subnet: Microsoft and Nortel have that close relationship ... Is it having an impact -- are those interested in Microsoft for UC also expressing more interest in Nortel?

Machowinski: We didn't specifically look at that, but presumably it does help Nortel, especially once additional, closely integrated products hit the market.

Cisco Subnet: You say VoIP is not a barrier to UC, but that most companies view it as a prerequisite. Under what circumstances would someone implement UC but not VoIP -- and can that even be done using a Cisco product (or are you talking about, say, a universal inbox via Microsoft Exchange 2007)?

Machowinski: VoIP is not a requirement for UC (by our definition), but lack thereof is a barrier. You could deploy OCS and a gateway to interface with your legacy PBX, maybe if you're extremely cost conscious. The point here is that companies without a VoIP network aren't good UC candidates.

UC interoperability will be a key theme at next week's Interop show, says Eric Krapf from the NoJitter blog portal. This post calls out several areas that vendors need to work on:

* Number plans
* SIP and QSIG and PRI
* Federation
* Networking diverse PBXs
* Networking diverse voice mail
* Unified Messaging
* User Interfaces and Client
* Mobility voice and data channels
* Communications Management and Reporting tools

Meanwhile, a few of them have started -- or at least promised to start -- working on interoperability. At VoiceCon Orlando in March, Microsoft and IBM agreed to undertake interoperability tests. And of course, in August, 2007, Cisco and Microsoft agreed to make their wares interoperable but how much work they might have done on that has been overshadowed by the heavy competition between the two.   

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