VoIPosaur

I was reading an article here that seemed to tout IBM and Microsoft as the future of VoIP.  I may be a bit bias, being a Cisco man myself, but I have taken the time to go to Microsoft's Virginia campus and look at their latest product and to be honest, I'm not impressed.  Office Communication server is simply an IM server on steroids.  I wonder how many people will pass on Cisco, Avaya, or Nortel – tried and true PBX / VoIP providers, and instead, get Microsoft's first generation software only solution, simply because they believe "it's Microsoft, and we won't have to learn the GUI".

Here's something I found a bit amusing:

In last year's survey, Cisco Systems, Avaya, Microsoft, and Nortel were the top-ranked firms in the UC space–and in that order. For the 2008 survey, the rankings worked out this way: Microsoft, Cisco, Avaya, and IBM.

and here's another nugget:

41 percent of the companies surveyed this year said that they believed that the integration between communications software and hardware and back-office applications should happen through Exchange Server or Notes/Domino groupware.

I don't doubt that 41 percent of the people surveyed thought that their phone system should be shoe horned into an Exchange server, hopefully the other 59 percent had better notions.

Hopefully the people taking these surveys aren't the same one that hold the company purse strings.

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