Having been an observer (and sometimes participant) of Microsoft for many years, there are many tricks they have in their kit to obstificate and create “head fakes”. The latest is the “Quality of Experience” Server:
The Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Quality of Experience Monitoring (QOEM) Server, which monitors voice and video quality, will be available as a technology preview when Microsoft announces the shipment of Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007 on Oct. 16. QOEM itself will ship in before the year-end.
At first glance it struck me as odd that Microsoft would do a tool like this itself and not work with a third party who can do a much better job at building a QOS tool. This is because it is actually pretty tricky to do real QOS for VoIP and there are some good tools to do just that. Then it struck me, this is not a QOS tool but a marketing tool so:
Microsoft wasted little time, saying Cisco’s competitive offering is inferior and detailing the testing in a whitepaper. Microsoft compared the ability of the QOEM server to deliver a consistent call quality to Cisco’s CallManager 5.0 using 7961 IP phones, citing a study by Psytechnics Limited. The study concludes that Microsoft’s infrastructure “provides better voice quality than the Cisco CallManager version tested in virtually all the conditions enterprise users will likely encounter.”
Okay so paid research saying that Microsoft Call Quality is better than Cisco call quality. From a high level perspective what I can see is a comparison between using wideband and G.711 codecs which from their “user perception” studies would indeed result in the a better user experience in a lab environment. These types of whitepapers are used drive attention away from core issues when selecting a PBX. I think this one is launched to counter the very real problem Microsoft is going to face with LCS and that is it is very network dependent and in many cases is going to need a significant upgrade to support a voip implementation, something that many small businesses are woefully unprepared for. There are some other things in the 57 page whitepaper including one piece on Voice activated detection and how the others do not use it and Microsoft does. VAD is not used on enterprise networks because (a) it is not needed and (b) it is incredibly annoying and (c) it interferes with recording systems that are staple today. You can find the whitepaper here.
