I had a chance to do a follow-up interview with Mike Browne of Sprint and Eric Swift of Microsoft. Browne had been one of the case studies highlighted by Stephen Elop during the R2 release announcement, and Eric Swift is, of course, senior director for UC at Microsoft. Mike Browne confirmed that Sprint is on a path to migrate essentially all its internal users onto OCS."Call centers and a couple other areas are really the only places right now that's not in our plan for moving forward with OCS capabilities," Browne told me.
Right now the OCS rollout is focusing on field locations where sales personnel would have been stuck in a building or on a traditional wireless handset for calls. "We have a bunch of small PBXs scattered out, supporting them around the nation," and these are the PBXs that, as I noted in my earlier post, are being retired at a rate of 5-8 a week and replaced with OCS voice. The decision on where to roll out OCS to users is driven in large part by real estate--wherever offices serve as "landing zones" for users rather than places where people really spend all day--that's a candidate for MPLS data networking and OCS connections.
Using the Microsoft Communicator soft client on their PC, "We basically give them a headset and they have their office with them basically anywhere," Browne said. Communicator can also run on smart phones, and Browne said that some of his users have this mobile soft client deployed and they make VOIP calls over the Sprint EV-DO data channel. This keeps them connected and logged into OCS for presence purposes, which they wouldn't have if they were making cellular calls directly out into the public network.
Since Sprint knows something about voice quality, I asked Mike Browne whether the quality on OCS calls--whether over landline IP networks or VOIP over EV-DO--was consistently of acceptable quality. He said that is generally is, and that the variable that most often enters into the equation is bandwidth. This has been Microsoft's position since it first introduced OCS with its Real-Time Audio codec, which uses wideband encoding, which eats up more bandwidth, in hopes of overcoming any network impairments.
Browne noted that Sprint does also have a carrier class Nortel IP-PBX in place, but OCS users don't go through this IP-PBX. He added that even the more "traditional" IP-PBX showed a payback given the efficiencies the company was able to obtain from it versus legacy gear.
