The $2 million Office Communications Server wager

del.icio.us Tags: microsoft,office communications server,enterprise voice

The company I work for, Extend Health, is currently experiencing the best type of problem: rapid growth.  As many are aware, unchecked or overly rapid growth can sound a death knell for companies.  One potential reason for this correlation is the speed at which decision makers must make decisions.  More decisions are part and parcel of a larger company, but the additional staff necessary to make additional decisions generally lags behind the decisions themselves.  This leaves additional decisions to be made to existing decision-makers, which ultimately leads to a shorter decision lifecycle.

This past year, our company grew 10x in year-over-year numbers.  We did more business in a few days at the start of Medicare season than we did in the entire year previous.  We hope to grow another 4x this year.  This type of growth is putting a significant strain on our existing system, a Cisco UCCX with a few integration pieces installed.  For the past month, we have been evaluating two alternative solution: a Cisco UCCE with more integration servers, and an Avaya solution.  Both solutions are flagship contact center solutions, but they carry a hefty price tag: a low estimate puts the solution around $2.5 million, with a final figure more likely to come in above $3 million.

Part of my job is to review solutions and report on their overall ability to integrate into our environment.  Part of my nature is to add commentary on how viable I feel the solution to be.  As I was researching the Cisco solution, I stumbled across a newer offering: Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007.

Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 was launched not six months ago on 16 October 2007.  The launch was traditional Microsoft strategy: conquest through partnership.  Microsoft’s current claim is that it isn’t there to replace the PBX – yet.  As such, it has strategically allied with a number of hardware vendors such as Nortel, Polycom, Ericsson, Mitel, Dialogic, Audiocodes, and more.  The full list of sanctioned hardware vendors can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/uc/partners_hardware.mspx.  In short, Microsoft partners with hardware vendors for one of two reasons:

1. Connections to the public switched telephone network (PSTN).  No one in their right mind would claim that Microsoft is a telephony expert, especially when it comes to the PSTN or PBX spaces.  Microsoft has aligned itself with hardware vendors that handle nailing down calls and releasing calls when finished.  Microsoft has also worked diligently to leverage the feature set on PBX systems to supplement a weak feature set of an initial offering.  While there are plans to implement features like music on hold, call park, etc, Microsoft simply integrates with existing PBX systems at this point to achieve features it lacks.
2. Handsets/headsets.  The telephony paradigm has not changed significantly in 130 years.  People have used hardware to hear, speak, and initiate/terminate calls.  While the paradigm is changing with the advent of softphones, some people prefer to have the comfort of a traditional telephone set.  Microsoft has partnered with a few vendors (Polycom, Nortel, Jabra) to deliver a telephone experience more in line with traditional telephony.  Mind you, these aren’t your average telephone sets: they have fingerprint recognition, colorful presence indicators, and more!

Microsoft’s forte is providing a solid, well-integrated foundational software layer.  Establishing partnerships for hardware is a must at this point in time.  With the partnerships, Microsoft is able to offer OCS as a truly profound communications platform.

What Microsoft already had a strong background in was collaboration, e-mail and instant messaging, presence, and pervasive integration.  Microsoft Word, for instance, has tight connections with Sharepoint, which can be consumed as an RSS feed in Outlook.  Microsoft, with the delivery of OCS, integrates all the same familiar desktop software with the OCS system, essentially exposing presence and the ability for instant communication from Word, Outlook, or Sharepoint.  Exchange gets the ability to store voicemail and archived IM sessions, meaning you have your entire communications history in one place.  You can initiate a call to the author of a Word document, from the document.  You can start a video chat with someone in a discussion thread on Sharepoint.  The depth and thoughtfulness of the integration alone are sufficient to make a solutions-oriented person take pause.

What Microsoft didn’t have was enterprise voice.  In this context, enterprise voice means that we have lots of inbound and outbound calls.  There was voice chat and even video chat in earlier versions of Microsoft products, but those sessions were limited to internal conversations.  OCS leverages the hardware partnerships mentioned above to add the ability to deal with inbound and outbound calls as well.

I’m not certain that OCS is viable for us.  Our business is critically dependant on enterprise voice: we expect to hit a peak of 10,000 calls in an hour this fall.  However, I have taken significant note of where OCS is at and will continue to investigate the solution as rapidly as possible.  One thing is certain: with an estimated implementation-complete price tag of $500,000 for a jaw-dropping solution that we can build on top of, we’re taking this very seriously.