Microsoft, others scramble for spotlight at VoiceCon

Maikeru · Aug 21, 2007

Microsoft has licensed its RT Audio Codec for IP (Internet Protocol) voice calls to major hardware vendors including Intel, Texas Instruments, and Polycom, the company is set to announce Tuesday at the VoiceCon conference. It joins several vendors using the event as a showcase for IP telephony advancements.

Also during the show in San Francisco, Microsoft will announce an Oct. 16 launch event for Office Communications Server 2007, its next enterprise telephony and collaboration platform. OCS 2007 has already been released to manufacturers. The official launch event will take place in San Francisco, said Clint Patterson, a Microsoft director of product management.

Microsoft is moving in on the IP telephony market from the software side while Cisco Systems approaches from the data network end. The CEOs of both companies said Monday morning that the market is quickly shifting to so-called unified communications and they will make sure their products work together even as they continue competing in some areas.

Research backs up that sense of rapid change. Not including phones, 39 percent of revenue in the worldwide enterprise telephony market went to IP instead of traditional circuit-switched infrastructure in the second quarter, according to Dell'Oro Group analyst Alan Weckel. That's up from 31 percent in last year's second quarter.

Small and medium-sized businesses, latecomers to IP telephony, are now joining in, he added. Looking for big-company features such as the ability to have employees make calls from anywhere in the world using a software phone on a PC, these smaller players installed one IP line for every three traditional connections in the second quarter, Weckel said. A year earlier, only 19 percent of the lines they installed were IP.

IP telephony makes voice calls, video and conferences into a series of data packets so only one network is needed and those functions can be integrated with other applications.

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I think there has to be a fair level of standardization of VoIP and P2P VoIP systems, but don't think that has been happening quickly enough in the VoIP industry.

Love them or hate them, Microsoft really does appear to be everywhere in the computer world!

Cheers!

Maikeru Hatamoto

TechSpot

Microsoft, others scramble for spotlight at VoiceCon

Maikeru Newcomer, in training