Broadsoft Connections: Guy Kawasaki and Microsoft’s OCS?

Greg Galitzine : Greg Galitzine's VoIP Authority Blog
Greg Galitzine

Broadsoft Connections: Guy Kawasaki and Microsoft’s OCS?

I’m out at the Broadsoft Connections conference in Phoenix, AZ and I’m trying to stay as productive as possible while meeting with senior-level executives at a number of Broadsoft’s partner companies.
 
The event kicked off with an introductory keynote by Broadsoft president and CEO Michael Tessler. The theme of this year’s conference, Scaling New Heights, was brought to life by a series of BMX bikers performing acrobatic feats — twists and turns and flips and jumps — on an indoor series of ramps set up for the event. Very exciting, and very fitting given Tessler’s subsequent comments.
 
Tessler spoke about the growth of the market, as well as the growth of the opportunity. He broke the market down for the standing room only audience, and settled on three key areas which will bear watching over the next few years.
 
He cited industry stats that show the potential size of the market as follows:
 
Hosted Voice/Hosted Applications: Infotek said that by 2010 marketplace for hosted voice and services would be $37 Billion, and the hosted voice part of that would be approximately $10B.
 
Business Trunking: Frost & Sullivan stated that connecting customer premise-based equipment to the network was an opportunity approaching $11B in 2006.
 
Residential Opportunity: Back in February, Ovum announced its view that the 2010 worldwide voice/residential opportunity would be equal to about $40 billion.
 
He summed up by telling the audience that the market is growing, and growing quickly. With a worldwide service provider market opportunity of roughly $88 billion by 2010, Tessler told the audience, “We’re here to help you capture a greater share of that opportunity.”
 
Scott Wharton, Broadsoft’s VP Marketing then came onstage to introduce the morning keynote speaker, the author, entrepreneur and Apple fellow Guy Kawasaki, who presented his address entitled The Art of Evangelism.
 
Kawasaki is an excellent speaker and he held the audience’s attention as he addressed his top 10 list of how to evangelize a product or idea.
 
I won’t go into it, but suffice it to say it was entertaining, thought provoking, and frankly a really interesting presentation, and I’m glad to have been in the audience.
 
 
One of the funnier moments came during the audience Q&A when someone asked Kawasaki what his thoughts were regarding the impending launch of Microsoft’s OCS scheduled for tomorrow. He didn’t seem to know much about the event, but then true to his Apple evangelist roots, he brushed aside the significance of tomorrow’s announcement with a comment that, “If it’s anything like Vista, then the companies in this room have nothing to worry about.”
 
Of course everyone laughed at the obvious partisan shot, but hey, when you’re the original evangelist for the Macintosh group at Apple, you don’t have to play nice with regards to Microsoft.
 
Speaking of Microsoft and their impending unified communications launch tomorrow, TMCnet editors are doing a great job of covering the buzz and the news leading up to that launch.
 
For more on the day’s biggest news check out the special featured section on the Unified Communications magazine home page.
 
 
Here are just a few sample headlines that are being featured on TMCnet as you read this.
 
 
 
 
 
I’ve been hearing some mounting buzz regarding tomorrow’s Microsoft news, and so much of the opinion is split between a “let’s wait and see what Microsoft can do” response and “It’s a really big deal when a company as large and powerful as Microsoft is, enters a market with such a big splash.”
 
For a sample of the type of things I’m hearing, one has to look no further than Rich Tehrani’s blog, where you have two extremes:
 
 
 
 
I’m hoping my schedule allows me to hear Bill Gates’ comments live tomorrow. In any event stay tuned through tomorrow and beyond, both to my blog and to TMCnet’s Microsoft OCS Launch coverage to learn all you need to know.
 


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