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Never Mind Your PBX...When is OCS Replacing Your Audio Conferencing Service?

The day before Microsoft's carefully staged and meticulously scripted launch event for Office Communications Server 2007 Release 2 last week, the company held a brief conference call with analysts. It wasn't the R2 deep dive that I was expecting, but rather an hour with Joe McCorkle, director of information technology, at RealPage. The company, a property management firm, is a Microsoft customer of course, and its implementation of Microsoft's unified communications technology provided an interesting indication of the company's abilities, ambitions and shortcomings in this area. Here are a few Joe McCorkle sound bites that I captured from that call."We hope with R2 to this year do away with Webex."

This summarizes what I consider the main--and typically overlooked--talking point of OCS R2. Regardless of where you stand on the whole "when will OCS be an adequate PBX replacement" debate, Microsoft's delivery of an audio conferencing bridge in R2 is intended to position OCS as an adequate replacement for traditional audio conferencing systems and services. To this end RealPage intends to completely replace its use of Cisco-based conferencing services with OCS-based audio conferencing.

Further along these lines, at the R2 launch event, Intel VP Gregory Bryant noted that his company consumes 1 million audio conferencing minutes per day. With OCS instant messaging now available to all 86,000 Intel employees he is interested in seeing all audio conferencing usage transitioned away from services and to desktop software. In doing so he expects Intel to slash its audio conferencing spend by 20-30%.

"65% will be on full OCS by end of year."

By "full OCS" we're talking instant messaging, conferencing, voice...da woiks. All of RealPage's 1,000 or so employees have access to OCS instant messaging. Today about 150 of them get voice services solely from OCS, presumably with one of those boxy handsets designed specifically for OCS sitting on their desks. The rest are still connected to Avaya Communication Manager. The PBX software was just updated so it could be interconnected to OCS via an Audiocodes gateway. But by the end of the year the total of employees using OCS-attached desk phones rather than the IP phones off the Avaya PBX will jump to 650.

"We're waiting on a phone from Polycom--a smaller version without with screen but with the dial pad. Once that's released we will deploy more."

This was news to me. Apparently there are some new OCS handsets close to being released. Hopefully these are honest-to-goodness IP phones in the vein of the Polycom CX700 and LG Nortel 8540, as opposed to those USB peripheral thingies that make up the rest of the OCS end station options. An actual portfolio of Ethernet-attached IP phones would be a step in the right direction in Microsoft positioning OCS as a PBX alternative. As would some sort of branch office solution. And E911 support. And analog phone support. And multiple line appearances. And hunt groups. And...

"We wanted to get rid of the old voice mail system because it was way too expensive."

Moving a bit away from OCS here, but still interesting territory. Turns out RealPage's Avaya voice mail system is going end of life. Instead of replacing it with the latest and greatest voice mail system from a traditional vendor, RealPage is instead upgrading its Exchange 2003 email servers to Exchange 2007 which has inherent unified messaging capabilities. I have a feeling we're going to see a lot more of this sort of thing in the not so distant future.

"Insert pithy video conferencing quote here."

Ok, I managed not to write down exactly what was said about video conferencing, but here's the poop. RealPage wanted to use room-based video conferencing as a way of setting up face to face meetings between dispersed work groups and in this way cut back in travel costs. Rather than deploy systems from Polycom, Tandberg or LifeSize--some of the names you'd normally come across when shopping around for video conferencing equipment--RealPage installed Microsoft Roundtable units in each of its offices.

Microsoft definitely has a ways to go to compete effectively on all these fronts it's chosen for itself when it comes to the market for business communications systems. But Stephen Elop, President of Microsoft's Business Division, was right in describing his company as a "disruptive challenger in enterprise voice."