Unified Communications Group Team Blog : Office Communications Server

R2 Arrives

UCG — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 21:16:00 GMT

Just over a year since OCS 2007 launched, R2 made its debut today. Stephen Elop, President of Microsoft Business Division, hosted the launch event before a studio audience and thousands of Web participants from around the world. Several customers joined the launch to share their experiences with UC and using OCS to cut costs and boost productivity. .

Some of the impressive customer highlights include:

· Sprint & Intel talk to Microsoft about their unified communications deployments, why software makes a difference, and how they’re using OCS to help cut costs.

· Swisscom is reducing the time to generate customer proposals by up to 20%, lowering the company’s costs of developing proposals and improving its responsiveness to customer requests.

· Lionbridge, a company with 4600 users, expects to save $1.3M in audio, web and video conferencing costs with Communications Server 2007 R2.

· Shell has over 150,000 employees on Communications Server IM and is already at over 8,000 users on Communications Server VOIP, with a plan to roll out much broader, and expects to retire over 200 PBXs over the next few years.

· BFU is the Swiss Council for Accident Prevention, a private foundation that provides safety advice to local authorities, institutions, and individuals. With OCS 2007 R2, the 130 person organization expects to cut travel costs by CHF4,800 (U.S.$4,000) per month and cut IT administration costs by CHF1,000 (U.S.$860) per month by replacing e-phone servers with the Attendant Console.

· Tieto is one of Europe’s largest service providers. With OCS 2007 R2, this 17,000 person organization expects to cut travel costs by 15%.

· RealPage is a software vendor for multi-property management applications. With OCS 2007 R2, they are saving 3 million annually in travel expenses and more than $200,000 annually in customer support costs. They also expect OCS to improve their customer acquisition, reducing costs by $60,000.

In addition, partners turned out in spades for the launch. More than 30 partners announced new products and services, including more than 10 new phones and audio/video conferencing devices. Read a summary of all the partner news here.

One of the things you’re not going to hear much about from today’s launch is perhaps the coolest. Schlumberger, a leading oil and gas service company, builds a reservoir modeling software called Petrel. Using the developer platform in OCS, Schlumberger has designed communications into the very fabric of Petrel. Their thought leadership will allow customers to collaborate within the context of their modeling work – tapping into experts across the globe with the click of a mouse.

What Schlumberger has done represents an exciting new direction for UC, where every application can have communications embedded within it just as SharePoint and Office do today. But, there’s more that’s possible with OCS R2. With the new developer tools, corporate developers and ISVs can build intelligent applications that enable seamless communications and collaboration – and really drive business results. This is going to bring a new wave of communications-ready applications.

You can view the launch, see more customer case studies, and access loads of content at www.ocsr2launch.com.

Justin Fenton, Senior Product Manager for UC

IBM’s Email Strategy Takes Another Sharp Turn

UCG — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 17:03:00 GMT

Last week, in more pre-Lotusphere PR, IBM announced their intent to acquire Outblaze’s email technology and make it part of Bluehouse, IBM’s cloud-based social computing and collaboration offering, which is now in beta.

This is a fascinating acquisition. Why acquire Outblaze when Lotus Notes is the #2 business email solution in the market? What will happen to the hosted Notes messaging solution IBM announced last fall? Why not scale Lotus Notes to a deliver a multi-tenant or Web-accessible offering? Why make customers choose between Notes for on-premises email or Outblaze/LotusLive Notes for cloud-based email? Couldn’t IBM convince enough users to get on hosted notes so they had to buy some consumer grade users to test scalability?

When I talk to customers, they tell me they do not want a technology ultimatum – a hard choice between a roadmap in the cloud or on-premises. Customers require the flexibility to use both and move between both modes of delivery, and that’s why our approach with Exchange Server and Exchange Online is catching on. Will IBM’s new email strategy give customers that flexibility? Only time will tell.

As in the days of Workplace, IBM’s email strategy seems once again murky.

Brandon Hoff

Exchange Technical Product Manager

LotusFear?

UCG — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 16:30:00 GMT

Last Wednesday, IBM kicked off their pre-Lotusphere PR barrage by claiming momentum for Lotus Notes. Throwing out a half-dozen stats, IBM seemingly mounted an unassailable argument for the resurgence of the once-thought-dead Notes, except for one thing – most of it was false.

Case in point, early versions of the IBM release quote Gartner stats about market share, but by Friday, IBM had doctored the release to remove the Gartner stats. Maybe this article in Computerworld (Au contraire: Exchange's lead over Notes is actually 'getting bigger and bigger,' says Gartner <http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic

&articleId=9126118&intsrc=news_ts_head> ) had something to do with it?

David Scult, Microsoft’s GM for field and partner marketing, does a great job setting the facts straight here <http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2009/jan09/01-16QAcult.mspx>. Among my favorite highlights from David:

· In response to IBM’s claim that Notes is in half of the Fortune 100 – “Lotus Notes was once in at least 67 percent of the Fortune 100 companies, so in that context, 50 percent now isn’t terribly impressive.”

· And according to a Ferris Research survey <http://www.ferris.com/?p=318858> of 917 organizations worldwide, Exchange has a 65 percent share of the messaging market, while Notes/Domino has a 10 percent share. Ferris’s findings are consistent with Gartner’s lead e-mail analyst, Matt Cain, who publicly stated <http://www.serverwatch.com/trends/article.php/3682041> last year, “We forecast that Microsoft will get 70 percent of the commercial e-mail market by 2010.”

Even the Lotus Notes community has compiled a list of companies that are switching to Exchange from Notes, citing customers including ExxonMobil, JP Morgan Chase, Deutsche Bank, and Novartis. <http://dominoorexchange.pbwiki.com/>. (Note: you need a password to access this wiki.)

If you really dig into IBM’s numbers, you’ll find that they have started quoting “licensed” Notes users. A licensed user with no timeframe is exactly that – a user that either is, or was, licensed on Lotus Notes. Is that a useful market figure, quoting licenses sold in 1994? Using the same approach, IBM could also tout 100+ million ‘licensed’ 123 users.

But the real question this IBM FUD raises is this: why is IBM so desperate to prove that Notes is not slowly dying? Why is IBM so scared? My guess is:

· IBM is steadily losing market share based on more than 10 million people abandoning Lotus Notes for Exchange and SharePoint. The momentum is increasing as more than 2 million began the switch in the last 6 months.

· This transition is hastened by economic urgency to cut costs and the availability of Exchange Online and SharePoint Online <http://www.microsoft.com/online> , to which IBM has no answer (IBM’s current ‘hosted Notes’ offering is only for orgs from 1k to 10k users, and is not multi-tenant <http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?doc_cd=162564&refg_rss> cloud-computing, and press reports indicate that IBM is even losing market share to cloud-based consumer email applications).

· In the end, the loss of Notes means it is harder for IBM to sell Sametime, Connections, or Quickr.

· And, if you’re IBM, the more critical issue is that IBM Global Services, which accounts for huge portions of IBM’s profit, looses the opportunity to charge IBM customers consulting and integration fees to make its disparate technologies work together.

Marian Anderson said “fear is a disease that eats away at logic”, and sadly, that seems to apply even to respected market leaders such as IBM. We saw the first signs of fear and desperation last Wednesday, and it was not becoming of a respectable company such as IBM.

I look forward to seeing what else IBM has coming this week, and I hope they will hold the bar a bit higher for their PR. Whether they do or not, we will be on this blog offering our perspective on the news.

Julia White

Director of Exchange Marketing

Microsoft

Office Communications Server 2007 and Office Communicator 2007 to be released to manufacturing (RTM) tomorrow!

UCG — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 06:38:00 GMT

Today, Jeff Raikes announced some great news at the Financial Analyst Meeting that Communications Server 2007 and Communicator 2007 is code complete and will be released to manufacturing tomorrow, July 27^th.

RTM is a significant milestone in our unified communications and VoIP strategy, and we’re looking forward to general availability this fall.

To learn more, please check out some Q&A with Gurdeep Singh Pall on the PressPass site.

More technical information will be coming in the next few days, weeks and months to help you with your deployments.

- Kevin Engman

UCG Community

Devices added to Office Communications Server Public Beta

UCG — Mon, 14 May 2007 20:29:00 GMT

Are you excited about devices?

If so, please check out the next generation of phones and devices we announced today with our partners optimized for Office Communications Server 2007 and Office Communicator 2007. We’re encouraging customers to test drive some of these products through our beta program starting tomorrow.

Also, if you get a chance, take a look at the partner demos at the Channel 10 home page.

- Meera Mehta

Senior Product Manager, Unified Communications Group