Entering the ring

In a keynote address at the San Francisco event where Microsoft rolled out its Unified Communications portfolio last month, chairman Bill Gates touted the benefits of software-based computing and the power of integrating presence and click-to-talk features into business applications.

Later, in a conversation with CMP channel assistant news editor Jennifer Hagendorf Follett, Gates said Microsoft’s channel is evolving to meet the new opportunity, but noted that channel capacity could be the biggest challenge the Redmond, Washington-based vendor faces as it moves into the Unified Communications market against competitors such as Cisco Systems. He also downplayed the likelihood of Google and open-source VoIP staking a claim in the enterprise space.

Edited excerpts of the conversation follow.

CRN: Why does Microsoft need to be in the VoIP market, and when did you first determine that was the direction you needed to go?

Gates: We’re all about the magic of software and improving the kind of experiences and productivity people can have by providing software. So we’ve got, of course, Windows PC, we’ve got Office Server, we’ve got Exchange and SharePoint, on the mobile phone we have Windows Mobile, and as we looked at a scenario that we could improve dramatically, the telephone just kept coming up. It was actually a little more than five years ago that I had some of the top engineers move over to work for Jeff Raikes [president of Microsoft’s Business Division], and he created this new business area. People such as Gurdeep Singh Pall, who’s the head of engineering, moved over from the Windows networking team. So we built a team, there were a few acquisitions, very small, but that was an element of it ... but now is the first time we’ve got a solid product line. So, it’s the opportunity to bring telephony into this world so that you only have one directory and have all this flexibility – that, whenever you see someone’s name, [you can get] their presence ... [or] get in touch with them [without] having to worry about phone numbers.

In some sense, you could say it’s interesting how long people have wanted to stay with their traditional PBX because, even though it wasn’t well-integrated, it kind of worked. Now we’re showing people an evolutionary way to get these benefits when they choose. They can actually drop the PBX altogether and just have software running on the Windows server.