Gurdeep Singh Pall will be talking publicly for the first time about Wave 14, the next release of OCS.
Gurdeep Singh Pall will be talking publicly for the first time about Wave 14, the next release of OCS. Interestingly, Gurdeep's lead-in video cites, among other things, the filing late last year in which AT&T asked the FCC to retire the PSTN.Microsoft's been coming here six years--time flies...
Gurdeep is using "legacy" office furniture as a prop. The PBX systems that were being sold six years ago "were designed for this reality," he says, indicating the old-school setup with the black phone.
Microsoft's idea--if they had to build a communications system "without being tethered by the past," what would you do? Specifically, how do you use software. "We had the luxury of doing that because we weren't in the PBX business. "We had the luxury of being disruptive, to think differently."
70% of Fortune 100 companies have OCS today; it's forced every player in the industry to have the conversation about what your desktop strategy is in the enterprise.
Gurdeep pushes away the office set, look to the future with the demo stands.
Slides come up, Microsoft Communications Server "14" (the 14 is still the code name).
"No, you may not want to throw away your PBX. Of course not. Communications Server 14 will sit next to it" and be ready to take up the load when you retire the PBX.
It's built to work with Exchange, SharePoint and Office. Designed to be extensible and interoperable.
"We don't say buy every soup and nut from us," use partners just as they did with Dell, HP, etc.
Today 100 million people can use Office to communicate, as Jeff Raikes predicted a few years ago. He also predicted costs will be cut in half, and Gurdeep says Allan Sulkin's RFP session this afternoon will demonstrate that this goal has been met as well. "Go check it out; it includes all those things"--such as phones.
Last prediction was rich communications from everywhere. Jamie Stark of Microsoft comes on to demo it. He opens his Office Communicator window; he can add his location information manually to his client, since he's off campus now, but if he's on the network, it can show that automatically. So contacts can see his presence and location.
They can take this location information and send it to a routing service provider for 911 routing. "If I fill in all the address information, all that information goes off to emergency services" if E911 call is made.
Now he's showing voice mail replay in the OC client. Also, a speech rec engine can listen to the voice mail and send a text summary.
BTW, here's the press release.
For collaboration, Jamie's showing integration with Share Point, finding subject matter experts within the company from inside OC. He escalates to video, with the ability to measure the bandwidth available for the given session, and treat the media appropriately, scaling it up to HD or eliminating it entirely if quality isn't available on the network.
Extensibility of the platform: John Rauschenberger, CTO of Clarity Consulting. They have a contact center solution. One of their customers, Emerson Ecologics, which sells nutritional supplements, that acquired another company with its own contact center. There were 2 PBXs that weren't compatible, wanted an integrated contact center solution. Clarity removed both PBXs, put the call center infrastructure in Clarity's datacenter in Chicago, running OCS. A hosted contact center service.
Picked that scenario because the application was built easily.Gurdeep Singh Pall will be talking publicly for the first time about Wave 14, the next release of OCS.
