There was some a little nice give and take on this site about the relative value of a VoIP systems developer delivering a unified communications solution with its own home-grown IM presence. The chat centered around ShoreTel 8 and its support for Microsoft Live Communications Server 2005 corporate instant messaging platform. I thought I'd chime in with my two bits.
There was some a little nice give and take on this site about the relative value of a VoIP systems developer delivering a unified communications solution with its own home-grown IM presence. The chat centered around ShoreTel 8 and its support for Microsoft Live Communications Server 2005 corporate instant messaging platform. I thought I'd chime in with my two bits.As noted, ShoreTel is integrating with LCS 2005. It's a version of Microsoft's IM server that has certainly been deployed by businesses, but which Microsoft is no longer actively selling. It has been more than a year since the more robust, more feature-rich Office Communications Server 2007 superseded LCS. In supporting the older IM platform, ShoreTel's plan seems to be to sell its communications systems to Microsoft IM customers who have not yet migrated to OCS. There are plenty of these companies out there, so the strategy seems to me a perfectly valid one. Moreover, LCS support is a good way for ShoreTel to kick off its Microsoft UC integration work. After all, the majority of ShoreTel's IP PBX competitors still have OCS integration as a Q3 or Q4 roadmap item.
It also should be pointed out that LCS is not the only corporate IM server that ShoreTel 8 will support. The system will also be to integrate with IBM Sametime as well, and OCS support is definitely on the horizon.
Separately, Nortel has long been the company that tends to come to my mind when it comes to a voice systems vendor with a UC platform that includes its own IM presence. This is because native IM is a hallmark of Nortel's Multimedia Communication Server 5100. But the company is moving away from aggressively marketing MCS 5100 as a standalone UC platform with native IM presence, and is instead focusing sales on Converged Office, which relies on Microsoft IM. In fact, Nortel was the first IP PBX developer to actually deliver support for Microsoft OCS 2007. When I last spoke with Nortel, I got the distinct impression it was sort of cannibalizing MCS 5100, picking it apart and using its various software components in other product offerings.
Inter-Tel was another company with native IM. Its Unified Communicator software, which Mitel still seems to market, has its own IM presence engine. But it's unclear how much attention this is getting post-merger now that it's sharing a product portfolio with Mitel Live Business Gateway, which relies on OCS 2007 for IM presence.
It's my understanding that Cisco's respective Unified Presence Server has its own native IM software. However, I'm not getting the impression this is a feature that the company is marketing all that aggressively. The plan seems to be for the Cisco software to mainly provide telephony presence services and intelligent call routing rules, while integration with Microsoft and IBM will deliver all the IM stuff.
So for better or worse the trend is presently away from voice systems developers delivering homegrown IM presence software. Better because it lets telephony vendors be telephony vendors. Worse because it's providing Microsoft with an opportunity to establish a base of LCS and OCS customers, which it will later be able to mine as VoIP customers as well.
