Unfortunately this morning won’t lend much time to writing out a long post on the matter but I’m perturbed by the comments by Microsoft’s Gurdeep Singh Pall. I caught up on the story over at Matt McGillen’s blog post and I have to say I had a hard time containing the laughter. Let’s talk about a few of the points that Gurdeep made.
1. “Microsoft’s UC solution is a lower cost solution, better integrated, and more flexible than Cisco.” Let’s consider a regular enterprise deployment of voice, video, and collaboration. I won’t go into detail on things the solution holds in common such as Active Directory servers, voice gateways, Network Infrastructure for connectivity, or “endpoints” (regardless of type).
According to the MS OCS Planning Guide and OCS VoIP Guide (Enterprise Voice), Centralized Enterprise solution consists of multiple servers for different roles. These include the following servers A/V internal, A/V external, Web Conferencing internal, Web Conferencing external, Mediation Servers (1 per voice gateway), IIS Servers, IM and CDR, Exchange for messaging, a Speech Recognition server for speech rec in Exchange, Front End OCS servers, and Backend SQL Servers. Wow what a mouthful. You can click on the reference architecture for a better picture of all the boxes required.
According to the Cisco SRND for UC you need the following for voice, video and collaboration. Cisco Unified Communications Manager (typically two), Cisco Unity Connection (can be one or two for high-availability), Cisco Unified Presence, and Cisco MeetingPlace Express (one internal, one external).
And when Microsoft says you get it all for “free”, don’t be fooled. You’ll have to buy all the servers to support the OCS deployment, the maintenance for those servers on top of the CALs and Software Assurance. Run the Microsoft License tool and compare the pricing for yourself. When Cisco Unified Workspace Licensing is used, the total cost of ownership of Cisco blows Microsoft out of the water.
2. “He held up a Cisco IP phone in one hand and a Netbook in another and said ‘Each of these is a 300 dollar device that sits on your desktop.’” That’s cool. How often does the Netbook need to be rebooted? Is there a dedicated processor separating and prioritizing the voice traffic so quality can be guaranteed?
3. “‘I don’t care if you call your PBX Call Manager, it hasn’t changed – it’s still a PBX’” If you want to boil it down like that, sure it is! And so is OCS.
4. “Putting phones on desks means more network switch ports are required. Some networking vendors will love this, but your CFO won’t.” Matt already picked up on this being inaccurate so I won’t bother extending further comment.
I’m just disappointed by the clear misunderstanding of the goal of Unified Communications by Microsoft. The goal is to provide for a consolidated communications fabric that empowers the user to react and communicate more efficiently, easily and quickly. The user does not care what the black box is called or how it works. The only concern of the CEO is that his communications always come through, are accessible wherever he is, and empower him to stay in touch through whatever device or method he/she chooses.
May 6th, 2009 | Category: blog | Comments (1)
