There's a lot at stake when Microsoft finally releases Office Unified Communications Server later this year. Certainly it's the highlight of this week's VoiceCon event in San Francisco. The big news today was its decision to offer the product as a service, a la its other Live technology. But even if the on-premise version is only mediocre, it could mean computer-telephony integration (CTI) is no longer a pipe dream.
Of course, most people using a cell phone today would already be able to claim some degree of CTI: they can send e-mail, access their corporate network and do other tasks through their handset. But real unified communcations means that functionality becomes much more of a two-way street between the desktop as well as the mobile device. Right now they're two islands in the same data stream. Nortel is counting on this for its foray into the enterprise space (and it's weird that it was Cisco's John Chambers, not Nortel's CEO, who joined Steve Ballmer onstage at VoiceCon) and it could mean a major growth path for Microsoft, too.
When I worked at CDN I wrote a lot about CTI, and the fact that the voice resellers and the data resellers needed to upgrade their skill sets. The same thing could happen with their customers in the enterprise -- network admins that need to learn a lot more about applications, and IT managers that have to start thinking about the range of communication options available to their users. Despite an endless wait, I'm still hoping for the best.