Today’s news that Microsoft made a $44.6 billion cash and stock bid for Yahoo! will very likely shake up the highly competitive market for Internet search, but ripples could also be felt in the bourgeoning Unified Communications space.
Microsoft's Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007 is the company's flagship UC offering and a revamped version of Live Communication Server 2005 is still key to the product's IM capabilities.
However, while it's unclear how Yahoo's portals and other services would be integrated, a combined Microsoft-Yahoo would be able to create a "social platform" that could become a new entry point for UC to the Web.
"The combination of these two teams would enable us to jointly deliver a broad range of new experiences to customers that neither of us would have achieved on our own," Microsoft chief software architect Ray Ozzie, told the AP.
And that likely means an expansion of UC capabilities and an extension of ways in which it is delivered. Because so many company employees use public IM clients the consolidation of clients always help ease regulatory and compliance issues. Overall, OCS is designed for the tight integration of Exchange and Outlook, which extends the presence feature of IM to other mediums.
And challengers in the UC space are around every corner. Let’s not forget the competition heating up back east as IBM’s Lotus Development unit recently shifted its integration, social software and Unified Communications operations as it readies for a Web 2.0 battle.
It is going to take some time to shake up. To learn more about today’s news, please read TMC’ President and Editor-in-Chief Rich Tehrani’s article here.
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