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Do You See What I See in UC?: Page 2 of 4

Why do 93 percent believe UC is cost-justifiable, yet only 30 percent have a UC strategy? We think the explanation is simple: UC is still in the early adopter stage, and many companies are not sure which vendor’s pitch to believe and which platform to implement. They have begun to consider these vendors and platforms, however, as we shall see next.

Vendor Mindshare

To find out which unified communications vendors and solutions the end user respondents are considering, we listed several of them and, for each one, asked if the respondents’ organizations were 1) currently using the product, 2) considering the product, 3) not considering the product, 4) didn’t know their company’s plans for the product, or 5) had never heard of the product. The results are shown in Figure 2.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of this figure is the mindshare lead that Microsoft’s OCS 2007 and LCS 2005 have over all the other unified communications platforms. Over 45 percent of end user respondents indicated that their companies are either now using LCS or OCS or are considering one of them.

We expected Lotus to take either first or second place, on the strength of its installed base, but it came in third, behind Cisco’s Unified Personal Communicator (CUPC). Nearly 35 percent of end user respondents said their firms are either using CUPC or considering it, compared to 27 percent for Sametime and 24 percent for Lotus Notes. If we look only at the percentage that are considering a UC product, it is clear there is a two-way battle between CUPC at 26 percent and Microsoft OCS at 37 percent, while only 6 percent are considering IBM Lotus Sametime (and 51 percent are not considering it at all).

When Cisco saw these findings, it protested, claiming it is the true UC leader and asking how a company (Microsoft) that did not even have a shipping product (OCS) could claim UC mindshare leadership. We told Cisco that the users supplied the data in this survey. In addition, we pointed out that, while Cisco does indeed ship many, many IP-PBXs and IP phones, and has market leadership in the IP-telephony space; very few of these telephony systems are placed in what we would consider as presence-enabled, unified communications environments. We note that Cisco is actively seeking to change this, by modifying its licensing structure so that IM and presence come standard with an IP telephone.

Microsoft’s mindshare lead is stronger among respondents from smaller companies (less than 1,000 employees) than among those from larger companies (more than 1,000 employees). In smaller companies, 28.3 percent are considering Microsoft OCS compared to 12.8 percent considering CUPC and 6.4 percent considering Lotus Sametime. In larger companies, 36.3 percent are considering Microsoft OCS, 28.3 percent are considering CUPC; and 5.3 percent are considering Lotus Sametime.

Figure 2 presents a few other golden nuggets. For example, note that 10 percent of end users are considering Exchange whereas only 3 percent are considering Lotus Notes. The implication is that Notes, and consequently Sametime, may face net market erosion as more end users move to Microsoft solutions.

We also should mention that, according to IBM, approximately 50 percent of Sametime users are in organizations that have Exchange deployed. Clearly Sametime is at risk of being displaced by OCS for these users, because deploying OCS is relatively simple for Exchange users. IBM is responding by making Sametime compatible with Microsoft Office applications and thus more competitive with OCS/LCS for existing Office and Exchange users. In addition, IBM is significantly ratcheting up its own market awareness programs, some of which were clearly evident at VoiceCon Fall.

Figure 2 also suggests that several vendors— including Alcatel-Lucent, Nortel and Siemens—had better consider whether their products are viable, since nearly two thirds of the respondents either aren’t considering them or have never heard of them. All vendors need to make sure that their sales efforts are properly aligned with customer perceptions. It isn’t clear that this has happened yet, as we shall see next.