• UC guru Dave Michels says MS Lync does to unified communications what Outlook did to email in the 1990s. Outlook and Exchange were among the first mainstream solutions that combined email, calendaring and contacts into a single integrated application. Microsoft’s aim with Lync is to unify communications tools. What were the four most-significant improvements to the Microsoft Lync 2010 release? Michels highlights them in this Microsoft Lync article.
• Our very own Networking Media Group Director at TechTarget, Kate Gerwig, explains how Microsoft Lync disrupts the unified communications market this way: “If the future of UC is a set of features to integrate into other applications, who’s better positioned to do that than Microsoft — with its great developer environment and desktop mindshare?”
• TechTarget’s Microsoft Lync adoption survey found that — even though Lync is in it’s infancy, the product is off to a running start.  The 329 international voice and network professionals who responded to the survey cited compelling motivators for deploying Lync, as well as Lync issues.  

Are you left wondering whether Microsoft Lync is all  its cracked up to be? Leave us a comment and let us know whether you think the MS Lync fever is hype or ripe.

After the story published, Cisco requested a follow up conversation to talk more about the notion of integration and interoperability, so I got back on the phone with Roberto De La Mora, senior director of collaboration solutions marketing for Cisco.

De La Mora emphasized that customers are asking for better interoperability from Cisco, but they’re looking for the ability to integrate with third-party technology.

While Cisco’s collaboration products — like TelePresence and Jabber — can be purchased separately, they all play nice with one another. Businesses can purchase these products separately and the pieces do fully integrate with each other, even if they are purchased at different times, he said.

“We have bundling and pricing also to make it cheaper, but if you only want to buy WebEx for example, you can buy only that,” De La Mora said.

As an example, if a company starts off with only Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCUM), and then purchases Jabber down the road, Jabber will connect with CUCUM to allow phone and video calls. And because Cisco’s tools configure automatically, there is little involvement from IT needed, De La Mora added.

“All these pieces were designed to work together from the get-go, but that doesn’t mean you have to buy them all at once,” he said.

Sometimes for customers however, less is more. Other vendors — like Microsoft — bundle their collaboration product licenses into larger purchases for their customers. Cisco had always included Jabber as a separate line item charge for their customers, but recently saw the value in consolidating and began bundling Jabber licenses into CallManager.

Customers are fine with a monthly WebEx spend — but they don’t want to see the extra Jabber line item that could be growing rapidly each month. “When customers are seeing this extra line item spend increase, it’s an easy target to say ‘let’s eliminate that’,” said Bill Haskins, senior analyst for Wainhouse Research.

“People like WebEx, and so integrating that Jabber spend into something they are already buying is a great approach,” Haskins added.

Third party integration

UC and collaboration is still very much a mixed vendor environment, and customers have made it clear that they want better integration between Cisco products and their existing UC tools. Cisco will be making strides in satisfying their users in this area.

“We are doubling up on software investments, because most of those integrations users want aren’t just on a hardware level, but on a software level, too,” De La Mora said. Cisco currently offers integration to platforms like Microsoft’s Exchange, Office or Lync, and Google’s Gmail.

“If a user wants to start an instant message session with someone using Lync, or a video conferencing session with a person that has a unit from Polycom, we have open APIs and we use industry standards to make sure it’s not just integrated with Cisco,” he said.

Having the ability to make a quick phone or video call, check someone’s presence status or send an instant message from an integrated system can change an employee’s job experience quickly. And once a business decides to go all out and implement UC or collaboration tools into the workflow, they are in it for the long haul.

But new tools, especially those that are infamous for hogging bandwidth — like video — can wreak havoc on an enterprise network. The good news is that many network monitoring vendors have noticed this new blind spot that real-time UC traffic causes for IT.

Tone Software Corp, a provider of network monitoring and management for converged telecommunications and IT infrastructures, recently announced a free, downloadable monitoring tool for Microsoft Lync UC environments. Once downloaded, the ReliaTel Lync tool offers IT a full view of Lync quality issues, call quality statistics, and QoS dashboards to help pinpoint the root cause of developing and historical Lync quality problems, according to the company.

Tone Software’s ReliaTel product suite supports many different UC environments, including Avaya, Nortel and Cisco. The latest version of the provider’s ReliaTel VoIP and Unified Communications (UC) Service Assurance solution, 4.1, was the first version to offer proactive monitoring and management for Microsoft Lync UC environments — something that many enterprises are asking for.

As Lync adoption continues, organizations are realizing they need greater  visibility into the voice quality of their Lync UC services, which can overload their IP network and put additional strain on each Lync users’ desktop resources, Tone Software noted in a recent press release.

“The free ReliaTel Lync Monitoring Tool builds on that premise to provide Lync users with a quick and easy methodology to monitor and manage critical QoS across their Lync UC environment,” said Amit Kapoor, director of strategic technology for Tone Software.

Just like with any new network application, monitoring is key. And since enterprises can’t stop UC and collaboration once they start, being able to quickly identify performance degradation culprits and smooth out potential bottlenecks along the way will be essential to helping users take advantage of all the unique (and pretty exciting) features that UC tools have to offer.

As many sessions held during Enterprise Connect 2012 pointed out, user adoption of enterprise-grade UC tools has been a point of pain for UC vendors. But sometimes when a company goes all-in with enterprise UC or collaboration technology, it can realize serious benefits.

BJ Haberkorn, Group Product Manager for Microsoft Lync told us at the conference that Sprint has experienced a big benefit with Lync–a savings of $30 million annually.

Notably, Sprint has saved $2.5 million in avoidance of PBX upgrade costs, $6.7 million in recurring circuit costs and $4 million in cost avoidance for conferencing since the installation of Lync. The company has even been able to earn some green savings–$700,000 annually because it doesn’t have to power and cool old PBXs anymore.

Sprint has over 500 locations and was looking to do more with less, Haberkorn explained, and the collaboration tool has changed the office environment. The mobile carrier’s 39,000 users are now able to work remotely more easily with voice, IM, desktop file sharing and conferencing capabilities on one platform. As a result, Sprint has changed the layout of many of its offices and even reduced the number of its campuses. “They don’t have cubicles anymore,” Haberkorn said, noting that Sprint has set up unassigned work stations in which employees can grab a spot to get work done when they come in.

“But Sprint told us their employees are in the office no more than 40% of the time, because the employees are now enabled with the tools they need wherever they are,” Haberkorn said.

And the users love being able to go to a meeting by clicking a button without dialing any numbers or searching for conference passcodes.

In addition to cost saving benefits for the enterprise, employees enjoy the ease of use that comes along with click-to-communicate capabilities. While not every company will experience Sprint’s success, Enterprises should fully embrace UC and collaboration tools in order to get their users to follow suit, and to get the most bang for their buck.

Is Microsoft the perfect vessel for Skype to finally break into the enterprise?

Maybe. Enterprise unified communications (UC) pros have been consistently ambivalent if not outright skeptical of Skype’s ability to be a true enterprise UC player–and that includes IT pros using Skype in their environments today.

David Gurlé, vice president and general manager of Skype Enterprise (Skype’s enterprise business unit), told me in January that Skype has no intention of competing with incumbent UC vendors, such as Cisco and Avaya:

“We are not in the substitution market. We are in the complementary market,” he said. “It’s kind of an overlay across other communications infrastructure and application that people have deployed.”

But that is likely to change under Microsoft, which holds a large chunk of the overall UC market with its Lync 2010 server and legacy Office Communications Server (OCS) footprint. Microsoft spokespeople declined to comment specifically on how Skype might fit into Lync, which has its own desktop video software, but Microsoft’s press release offers a taste of what’s to come:

Skype will support Microsoft devices like Xbox and Kinect, Windows Phone and a wide array of Windows devices, and Microsoft will connect Skype users with Lync, Outlook, Xbox Live and other communities. Microsoft will continue to invest in and support Skype clients on non-Microsoft platforms.

It seems pretty clear why any UC vendor aligns with Skype: access to its user base.

This is why Logitech LifeSize recently announced its federation capabilities with Skype video conferencing a few weeks ago. Avaya, which plans to federate with Skype later this year, is also after its half-a-billion registered user base. No word yet from those vendors about what the acquisition will mean for these relationships.

Aside from the fact that Skype has been a juicy acquisition prospect for some time, Microsoft obviously sees the value in owning Skype’s massive user base. The dividends are probably much higher for Microsoft on the consumer side (especially federating Skype with its Xbox Live community and Kinect products), but don’t count it out for the enterprise. UC pros are looking for some quality, reliability and support reassurances before embracing Skype. Say what you will about Microsoft’s track record with product development (yes, we’ve heard the “Blue Screen of Skype” jokes–and love them), but it has a huge install base and has earned a heck of a lot more trust from UC pros than Skype has.

UPDATE: An Avaya spokeswoman says Avaya will continue to “honor that agreement” to support Skype for its customers.