When Microsoft muscles in on an emerging market

This is year is shaping up to be one of the most significant turning points in the history of modern unified communications. The world's largest software company has thrown down the gauntlet and made two big moves on the established and emerging voice communications markets. The question for CIOs is how this play will affect their operations in the long term.

Let's start by recapping Microsoft's two big moves - the release late last year of Lync in the business space and the acquisition of the consumer-centric Skype a few months ago. This blog isn't mean to be a "pros or cons" comparison of the technologies - in other words the topic of another two blogs - nevertheless rather an overview of what CIOs need to look at when Microsoft decides to enter a market.

Lync is the latest release of Microsoft's former Office Communications Server software IP-PABX and regarded by many as the first "real" release of the product which does what it says on the box. Microsoft is not "new" to this market per se, however the release of Lync is significant in the sense that it represents the company's first big marketing campaign to take a share of the corporate UC space.

Similarly, when Microsoft first offered a virtualisation product it was nearly like a trial program to prepare the market for a fashionably late entrance. In that case it was Hyper-V integrated into Windows Server which now competes with the more established players. A short list of Microsoft's enterprise software strategies:

So the only key piece of the puzzle missing for Microsoft is voice and video communications services, however that has now all changed with the events of 2011.

Slice of the corporate UC pie with Lync

With Microsoft making its intentions clear this year that it wants a slice of the corporate UC pie with Lync, let's consider what that means for CIOs responsible for business VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) systems.

Skype is used widely by consumers and in business so it relates so then to Microsoft's consumer and small business software strategies. But, for CIOs, the question is whether Microsoft will bring at the same time the reach of Skype and the enterprise position of Lync.

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