Will You Be Turning to Microsoft for Your Next Phone System?

Microsoft made a big splash in the small business community recently (whether you realize it yet or not!) with the announcement of their expected entrance into the unified communications space.

Why is this big news?

Microsoft’s entry into this space marks their plan to replace, or dramatically enhance phone systems with a server-based software solution (running on your servers or the servers of a hosting provider). A growing percentage of small businesses have already made the transition to VoIP phone systems; Microsoft’s solution will be in direct competition with these systems. Microsoft’s new method allows small businesses to keep their current phone system, but also gives them access to all of the bells and whistles VoIP offers its users.

What is unified communications?

According to Microsoft, “Unified communication bridges the gap between telephony and computing to deliver real-time messaging, voice, and conferencing to the desktop environment.” I realize that’s a mouthful, furthermore, I think this concept is best explained by the demo on their site http://www.microsoft.com/uc/demo.mspx

How will this impact you and your business?

If you have made the jump to a VoIP phone system, you are already aware of the powerful productivity benefits that come with using this technology. Most of these systems integrate pretty tightly with Microsoft Outlook, giving you enhanced communications capabilities.

But of course, nobody can integrate with your existing Microsoft technologies like Microsoft can! This close integration will benefit you in at least two obvious ways:

It will be increasingly easy to communicate effectively with anyone in your business or personal universe via voice, email, text, instant messaging, or video – all while using Microsoft Outlook as your hub for all communications.
It will be increasingly easy and cheap for your IT manager to set up new users on your network and provide them all of their necessary communications tools. Unfortunately many of you are familiar with the high cost of having to move phone lines within your offices (as people shift roles or locations, etc.) With Microsoft’s innovation, this expense will quickly become a thing of the past for your company!

I didn’t say it as strongly as Bill Gates did…here is his take on how this will impact you:

“Integrating the experiences you associate with the telephone–phone calls, voice mail, and conferencing – into the work you do on a computer – documents, spreadsheets, instant messaging, e-mail, calendars – has the power to fundamentally change the way the world works. We believe unified communications will transform business in the coming decade in the same way e-mail changed the business landscape in the 1990s” – Bill Gates.

As usual, Bill is right.

As much as we sometimes hate to admit it, the folks at Everon believe Bill is right. This platform will take communications in the workplace to a whole new level.

As is always the case with new Microsoft releases, you should give this a bit of time to work through the inevitable bugs, but Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates says this platform has already been rigorously tested because they know it has to compete with mainstream “always available” phone systems. Everon will implement this platform in 2008; I expect that we’ll see customer demand for it within the next six months.

Time will tell, but I believe that in a short period of time, this will prove to be a huge business for Microsoft. In fact, I would bet that a good number of you will begin implementing and reaping the benefits from this platform within the next year.

For more questions about this article please contact mcooch@everonit.com.

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