OCS Appliance on the horizon?

Thanks for all the great feedback on the iPhone launch post yesterday. Don't worry, I won't abandon any new gadget news, but I stumbled across this really cool OCS appliance at a friend's blog this morning.

StartReady is based in Amsterdam and, to my knowledge, the first to offer a Microsoft OCS-based UC appliance. Their site is a little light on details but Joachim Farla's blog post dives deeper into the solution. There seems to be 4 offerings. One each for standard and enterprise editions of OCS then a virtual version of each, assumably running on Server 2008 Hyper-V.

According to the article they claim it can be setup and configured in under 2 hours. Their strategy seems to build an abstraction layer that is presented in a very simple way then goes about doing all the heavy lifting on its own. In fact, in scouring the StartReady website I don't see a single screenshot of the OEM OCS anywhere. The OCS management console isn't difficult, but the StartReady console would be more simple for non-experts to complete. I have to wonder if any advanced functionality/configuration is hidden or unavailable through this solution.

Here's a full rundown of out of the box features:

Check out my last post on the launch of the iPhone 2.0

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• Microsoft
• VoIP / Convergence
• OCS
• Office Communications Server