One of the biggest announcements here at Interop this week has been the HP-Microsoft deal in Unified Communications. The headline number was that HP and Microsoft say they'll spend $180 million to do product development, services, joint sales and marketing around Microsoft's UC systems--i.e., Office Communications Server--together with HP services and devices.The deal was the centerpiece of the Interop keynote delivered yesterday by Ann Livermore, executive VP of HP's services group, who was joined on stage by Stephen Elop, president of Microsoft Business Division. Their joint discussion and demos wouldn't have broken any new ground for VoiceCon veterans, which in some ways is the news here--UC Takes Center Stage at Interop. There are a lot of hot topics here at Interop this week, but UC is clearly among them; the sessions in my VoIP/UC track were SRO yesterday, and the questions from the audience seemed to me to indicate that the attendees were folks who had advanced beyond basic IP telephony to thinking about the role that UC would play in their enterprise business processes.
One thing that for obvious reasons was new in this keynote, relative to the talks that Gurdeep Singh Pall has delivered at VoiceCon, was a demo of Halo, HP's telepresence system. Livermore and Elop brought in colleagues in Bangalore and Singapore, both of whom were using Halo telepresence, but whose composite image (a very well-composed, seamless composite) was delivered over traditional high-def video to the Vegas stage (that is, Livermore and Elop weren't using any kind of telepresence themselves.
This partnership is clearly a response by both HP and Microsoft to the various needs they each have to respond to Cisco's moves. Microsoft doesn't have a telepresence play, emphasizing desktop video through its client. And its current lead telecom services partner, Nortel, is in Chapter 11 and therefore has an uncertain future. Leveraging the former EDS SI organization is an important way for Microsoft to get OCS deployed in more enterprises.
HP, of course, is trying to fend off Cisco in the datacenter while also attacking Cisco on the data infrastructure front via ProCurve. Partnering more tightly with Microsoft adds a communications component to HP's Cisco response.
There was one ironic moment in Ann Livermore's keynote. In the course of ticking off the various new devices that HP would release as a result of the Microsoft partnership, she said, "We'll have an HP IP desk phone." Those who were at VoiceCon Orlando or have watched the video of Gurdeep Singh Pall's keynote will remember how he ended that talk: He held up an IP phone and a netbook and posed the rhetorical question of which you'd choose if you had $300 to spend.
In fact and in fairness, Microsoft actually did this routine again in the HP keynote here in Vegas, courtesy of Warren Barkley, who was Elop's demo guy. So it wasn't like they were trying to hide this pitch from HP, and of course because it was HP, Barkley could pose the issue as a choice between an HP netbook and a "generic IP phone," by which he meant the Cisco phone he was holding up. Barkley did mock this IP phone, pretending to be impressed that "there's a light that flashes when you get a voice mail."
Makes you wonder what the HP IP phone will look like.
