Microsoft just completed its virtual keynote launching Office Communications Server 2007, and while the substance is pretty similar to what the company announced for R2 back at VoiceCon Amsterdam, I thought there were some interesting elements of some of the conversations, that may indicate where Microsoft is placing its emphasis.Specifically, Stephen Elop, president of Microsoft's Business Division, who hosted the keynote, sat down with three customers who have been beta-ing R2, and the first noteworthy thing is that these customers were the kinds of "friends and family" type of customers: The group included Intel, whose relationship to Microsoft is obvious; and Sprint, obviously a technology company and one that also participated in the event as a partner providing SIP trunking. The one non-high-tech company on the panel was Infonavit, a Mexican financial institution that handles 60% of the mortgages in that country, according to CIO Victor Nunez, who was the company representative on the panel.
It was interesting to me to note that, across these 3 panelists, there seemed to be 2 themes that kept coming up: Replacement of "aging infrastructure," and productivity gains with OCS.
Both Victor Nunez of Infonavit and Mike Browne, VP of IT at Sprint, used the term "aging infrastructure" to describe their installed bases of PBXs, and both talked about OCS as part of the plan to replace this installed base. In Sprint's case, we're talking about an installed base of 490 PBXs, of which 5-8 are being retired per week as Sprint rolls out OCS to its 50,000 internal users; 3,500 of those users are currently on OCS for voice. The gating factor on rolling out OCS and retiring legacy PBXs, according to Browne, was how quickly Sprint could get MPLS service to the sites involved.
Victor Nunez said that of Infonavit's 4,000 employees, all use OCS for at least some capabilities, and half of these are using OCS as their voice communications system, and he believes that by the end of the year, that figure will be 100%. His verdict on OCS voice was: "It's working great." His next plan is to try and extend the system to the 20,000 employees of the bank's business partners.
Nunez also put some hard numbers onto the productivity benefit that he claims Infonavit is seeing as a result of deploying OCS. He said the system provides 30 minutes per day of employee productivity, but unlike some case studies where that time savings is left hanging and you have to extrapolate real productivity gains, Nunez was more specific. He said the bank is able to process 30,000 more mortgage loans a year based on the savings from OCS.
Gregory Bryant, the Intel representative on the panel, said that of Intel's 86,000 employees worldwide, 3,000-4,000 are doing VOIP all the way to the desktop, and this will rise to 10,000 by yearend.
A final point in R2's favor, according to two of the panelists, is its expanded attendant console features (see Allan Sulkin's writeup for more on this and other R2 feature/function developments). Both Victor Nunez and Mike Browne said that the attendant console features helped get executive users on OCS; "one of our little holdups there [before R2]was the executives," Browne said.
"So we're finally in the executive suite, we're getting those top users," Stephen Elop remarked.
So, bottom line from the announcement (I've got a one-on-one briefing in half an hour) is that, with R2, Microsoft is seriously going after the PBX installed base. Buried deep within the bowels of this virtual event, in the virtual breakout rooms, are sessions that will tell you how you can integrate OCS with your existing PBXs. But the message from the main stage was: OCS should be your next PBX (but don't call it a PBX).
