Today voice is one of the most important verticals for UC

What is the present market trend in Unified Communications?

Today people are beginning to realize the use of Unified Communications in
business circles. It broadly covers three-to-four pieces of communications.
Email is possibly the oldest and the most widely used form of communication.
Presently, Instant Messaging has taken over from the consumer perspective. With
IM one can give solutions in about ten minutes. Then the new rage is audio- and
videoconferencing on the Web. UC also gives high RoI benefits. Today voice is
one of the most important verticals of UC.

Microsoft's OCS 2007 is not as functional as PBX and IP PBX, so how do you
compete with them?

OCS 2007 and its capabilities not only give the basic services of the phone
but it also lets you do things which one cannot do over the phone. Web
conferencing with OCS will be dramatically different from what the phone does.
It can set up things like call forwarding options that allow a person to call
you irrespective of where you are. It also helps in routing the calls to the
device that is available. OCS is not designed to be a replacement for the
traditional PBX as we do not expect customers to rip and replace.

Sanjay Manchanda director, Microsoft business division, Microsoft India

Apart from the present day developments what are the new areas in UC you
are trying to explore in the near future?

There are few big areas where Microsoft is working.We are integrating UC
with applications. The vision is to drive communication enabled business
processes. We are working with SAP and Aspect on this front, as Aspect is a
leading provider in call center applications. In India also one can get
something called the Office Live Meeting. In other parts of the world we have
announced the Microsoft Exchange Online, which provides office live meeting. We
continue to improve on support from mobility so that the mobile device can
participate in all forms of UC. With Windows Mobile 6.0 one can participate in
all forms of UC. With this application one can set up an out-of-office message.
And this later allows connecting to the exchange server from anywhere.

What are the major challenges Microsoft is facing in the present market?

There are a couple of things that come as a challenge. The current
regulation prevents calls to be routed from an IP network to a TSTN network.
This limits some of the usage scenarios that customers can deploy. Another big
challenge is the lack of wide availability of broadband connection. For
applications like video and voice one needs to have a high bandwidth.

Sunny Sen

sunnys@cybermedia.co.in