When you think about how the traditional phone system (PSTN) or public switched telephone network really relied upon hardware to work, and now you think about merging the Internet and Phone networks, things get interesting. Major parts of the Internet are software based, think about Virtualization, how much now or 5 years from now of things we use on the Internet will be vituralized or in the Cloud. I think it's higher than you think and will continue to rise.
Well then take into consideration Unified Communications. The Microsoft Solution for Voice is mainly software. Since it is software, a good case can be made to Virtualize this software. Or could this be put in the Cloud in the Future?
I was reading this article on sys-con.com about this exact subject. The article goes on to talk about time stamping things like inbound faxes that could be a real plus to courts and other places that have to time stamp every inbound object like a fax. The article also points to some reference materials about cost savings of doing this in the cloud verse specialized on-site solutions. The article is a good read, it discussing issues about bandwidth for voice quality and stablization issue you need to think about before virtualizing something like UC. But as the world move closer to cloud computing, it really makes you think about software that support voice applications and how they might work in the cloud in the future.
What are your thoughts about this issue? Are you planning to deploy OCS or UC Vituralized, or possibly in the Cloud?
I was reading this interesting article today on CIO.com about Dow Chemical and their move from Exchange 2003 to Exchange Online or BPOS (Business Productivity On-Line Suite). The perception has been that Exchange Online is just for small and medium sized companies. This article explains the considerations that Dow made before making the decision to convert to Exchange Online. Dow is rolling out Windows 7 company-wide to their clients. According to the article they have had a 3rd party run their Exchange Servers that sit in Dow's data centers for sometime. So the transition to a cloud offering will not be that huge of a move.
BPOS offers Exchange 2007 today, but before the end of the year this will be upgraded to Exchange 2010 (and Sharepoint 2010). This is one of the reasons Dow looked at the online solution. Jumping from 2003 to 2010 was a large step to take internally. They wanted the features of 2010, but didn't want a huge impact on their end users. I love the quote in the article about one of the reasons Dow picked Microsoft as their partner for this solution after looking at many vendors:
"Nobody can run Exchange like Microsoft," he says. "From a security perspective, I can't afford to spend as much on securing an Exchange environment as Microsoft can."
Think about the Data Centers that Microsoft has today. Who else can build a data center of that scale, with multiple sites of the same scale? BPOS offers 25 Gig mailboxes with 24/7 access, and a service level agreement at 99.99% uptime. What would it cost you to build an infrastructure to give that level of service to your end users? They open Outlook and expect mail. It's like the lights coming on, or dial tone, we just expect it, and when it's down, you know it. BPOS is a different way of thinking about software. It's a monthly charge, not an upfront capital cost.
Are you on an older version of Exchange? Thinking about upgrading? Look into BPOS it might be the best solution for your company like Dow did.
And if you go read that article on CIO.com, let me know what your thought of it.
I was reading this article today on WindowsITPro site by B.K. Winstead. He talks about people that claim to be doing Unified Communications are most just piloting it, and most of the deployments are only using a very small percentage of the features of Unifed Communications(UC). His organization is using the Voice Mail part of UC in Exchange 2007, but he knows there is much more that can be done. He mentions how presence is the key to UC. Presence is understanding how people want to communication, what tools do they have like email, voicemail, IM, Chat, Video or other things like Desktop sharing. Presence makes leaving messages a thing of the past.
Then I got to thinking about all the features of UC, and what will be available in next few years in UC. I agree very few companies are using a majority of features available today. Will it be just voice mail? or VOIP or merging of email, voice, text, IM all into one tool? Who knows. I know the average person today has information overload. We have to consolidate, make communcation easy, simple to use and way more efficient.
Is your company trying UC? Are you in a pilot or do you have some pieces of UC deployed? When do you think your organization will have most of the UC features available deployed system wide?
I suggest you go read B.K. Winstead's article or comment here or my main blog over on blogs.technet.com/b/jweston