Preserving legacy investments in telephony

Microsoft last week announced that it was releasing Office Communications Server 2007 to a private beta group of 2,500 IT professionals. One of the goals of OCS is to allow companies to ease into IP-based telephony instead of using a ‘rip-and-replace’ model for legacy systems that is expensive and disruptive and leads to slower growth of the technology. Osterman Research has found in its own research that legacy investments in telecommunications equipment is one of the leading factors that is slowing the growth of IP telephony in the workplace.

Because IP telephony can be integrated with presence information, OCS will allow users of Office Communicator, Office or Outlook to identify someone’s presence status and then initiate a voice call. A large group of Microsoft partners’ products, including those from Avaya, Cisco, Siemens, Mitel and others will interoperate with Office Communicator so that VoIP calls can be placed over existing desktop telephony equipment, preserving legacy investments in desktop infrastructure.

The ability to preserve legacy investments will be key in helping organizations make the move to unified communications. It will help CIOs justify the adoption of unified communications by allowing them to demonstrate a lower cost of migration and to delay investments in infrastructure improvements. Further, preserving legacy investments gives an organization more flexibility in adopting unified communications, allowing retirement of desktop infrastructure when its useful life has ended instead of requiring it as part of a move to a new messaging system.

I’d like to get your thoughts on the difficulties associated with migrating to unified communications, particularly in the context of preserving legacy investments. For example, how difficult is it to justify the move to unified communications in your organization because of the existing infrastructure that’s already in place? Please drop me a line with your comments.