Sorry, Bill.

While I sense - from my trusty SiteMeter stats - that Bill Gates probably didn't read my post last week venting my lack of enthusiasm for his pending OCS launch, I should apologize just the same. My said lack of excitement led me to not attend his keynote, but after calls from people in the audience, I chose to catch the whole affair online.

I don't pretend to have the technical skills nor the MSFT experience to agree or disagree with all those who suggest the OCS dream needs a few cycles before stabilizing. But I can say that it shows well. For those of you who chose only to read the reviews and not watch the video of the OCS launch, time to admit poor judgment. The video is worth the one hour of your life. After all, it probably took Bill and his team the better part of 10 years to get it ready.

The PBX is not dead, though. It will be dead when the people who sell it - as in those feet on the street - can no longer retire quota with it. In the in term, it lives. And pretty well, too.

Back to OCS. Man does it demo well (except for the speech-rec part with 20,000 people in a room). How would you like to click and drag 8 names from your address book into on-screen box and have them all called into a conference call? Sounds simple enough but is a not a feature the masses have yet to enjoy. This, and many other intersections between voice and Office applications, is what we have to look forward to. If we can get OCS installed and up and running.

My only real beef - it's not hosted yet. It will come. So Bill says.

Countdown to Microsoft.

I'm struggling to get excited about Microsoft's red carpet arrival into the UC nightlife, happening this week down the street from me. Perhaps it's because I've been hearing about it for too long. Or because I spend so much of my time these days in the SMB space.

I do admit it will be interesting to see where they are a year from now. How well will it work? Who will have bought it? Will it really be only an enterprise play? And which vendors will benefit most or, suffer the worst from it? In the last 2-3 years, every incumbent vendor under the sun moved to align themselves in one way or another with Redmond. But most of those - Avaya, Nortel and others - now find themselves in more direct competition with Bill than ever before.

Some vendors are further along the curve than others, in my humble opinion. Much of the Microsoft talk has centered around what Cisco will do or how buyers will integrate one leading technology with the other. CallTower, a hosted unified communications provider based here has been integrating Live Communication Server with Cisco Call Manager for years now. They bring buyers Cisco product pre-packaged with Microsoft and Microsoft software and services packaged with the back end telco stuff already built in. Worth more than a look for anyone trying to get the best of both these worlds - without having to be a beta site.

Oh well. I won't be at the MSFT party this week but I do get to see a bunch of old friends in town for it.

When will Microsoft UC be here

No idea, really. Maybe Vegas does. But have a look at this take on how MSFT is building a funnel in advance of their launch - Microsoft to partners: Get cracking on voice. I've often wondered what it would be like to be a Microsoft Partner. And I still do a double take every time I see the word 'voice' in the same sentence as Microsoft.

While I believe that buying UC from Microsoft will fit nicely as an extension of Exchange and LCS (or vice versa), I don't see it in the SMB. That segment increasingly needs the whole shooting match from one provider, including the voice transport.

On a somewhat related note, I want to congratulate CallTower on being included in the year's CRN's Fast Growth 100. CallTower had the vision to include both LCS and Exchange in the hosted UC services, years before anybody else. Great SMB solution.