Leadership By Numbers

Category Administration Sametime
Tim Greene, of Senior Editor of NetworkWorld, is publishing an article on IP PBXs (not yet on the website). There are some key summaries regarding IBM and Microsoft.Quoting Matthias Machonwinsky, an Infonetics analyst, it's noted that,

The largest vendors--Cisco, Avaya, Nortel and Shoretel in the United States, are making interoperability efforts with the two big vendors of unified communications platforms, Microsoft (Office Communication Server) and IBM (Sametime).

The biggest difference between the two platforms has to do with Microsoft preferring a do-it-alone approach, versus IBM's orientation to collaborate with industry leaders.

Microsoft has a different spin, developing its own PBX functionality with OCS [Office Communication Server], with the long-term goal of supplanting PBXs. . . . The OCS telephony platform lacks standard PBX features such as attendant operator emergency services support and failover, according to the recent Gartner Magic Quadrant report on corporate telephony . . . . Gartner ranked Microsoft high in its vision, but low in its ability to execute in IP telephony.

If I was working in a single-vendor, single-stack architecture, like Microsoft's, I'd feel uncomfortable with the Gartner and Infonetics conclusions. For those with Sametime, Unified Communications (UC) may come sooner, include more open standards and provide more choices. I'm guessing that the price structure will be competitive, but Sametime UC will have the edge simply because IBM is embracing more vendors which will be competing amongst themselves. I already run Sametime on Linux (RHEL) and its support for Macintosh (Safari), Microsoft (IE), and Linux (Firefox) is tremendous.

Technorati Tags: Sametime