Breaking: Rumors About A Microsoft Deal With IBM Are True - VoiceCon Unified Communications Keynote From Microsoft

Betsy Frost Webb, General Mgr of the Microsoft Unified Communications group, is giving the keynote here at VoiceCon San Francisco 2008. I am interested in the presentation from Microsoft because there are rumors floating around this morning that later in the week Microsoft will do a “GodFather” deal with IBM to team up on a joint Unified Communications solution. This would be a direct move against Cisco. I’ve also heard rumors that I’ve posted here that Cisco has been in conflict with IBM over their recent moves into the compute sector.

I came in a bit late but she is touting the awards and customers that are using Microsoft’s Unified Communications products. I see a video guy so I’ll keep the blogging short since a video from TechWeb will come out later.

Communication Server will come out in February 2009. She is introducing Eric Swift now. Eric is giving a demo. Demo of UC is showing the collaboration workflow of handling a basic conference call. Authentication is handled by Active Directory. They are adding IM capability into the conference call in context. Now Eric is adding video live as well in addition to the conference call. I really like how you an mute individual participants who are in noisy environments.

Eric is showing Firefox compatibility for non-Microsoft platforms. This is a must have feature for the world that is migrating over to cloud services and other non-Microsoft platforms. More impressive is the capability to mute land lines that integrate into Communicator. This is a pretty big deal to pull off and it makes the offering mainstream not a ’silo’d Microsoft’ offering - traditional telephony coming together with IP based software services.

Betsy is back on touting all the cost efficiencies that UC offers. She is talking about one open infrastructure to work well with existing systems. Betsy is asking for feedback and emails at voicecon@microsoft.com

She is talking about how the experience from the Office group and what they bring to the table in UC. Some have been saying that Office is dead and that cloud computing and things like Google Apps is killing Microsoft Office….(Hmmm this could be the cloud and edge based software model…hmmm more on that later).

Betsy admits there are implementation challenges. She is opening up and asking for input (very sales oriented). The major update is coming in February - Office Communications Serve 2007 R2 on February 3, 2009. (why is it called Office Communicator 2007 we are in 2009???)

I wonder if the all this open discussion will be related to the IBM rumors - I am trying to confirm that Microsoft is going to announce a deal with IBM on a common platform.

End of Microsoft Unified Communications Keynote

UPDATE: I spoke with Microsoft’s Betsy Frost Webb about the rumor that I heard this morning and she neither denied or admitted the ’so called’ deal with IBM which tell me that a pending deal is coming. A source told me that an announcement will come Thursday from Microsoft and IBM here at VoiceCon about a Unified Communication partnership. On Twitter Damien Mulley was saying that there was rumblings about a IBM and Microsoft ‘cloud deal’. I’m not sure this is the same thing.